The Immediate Economy

Table of Contents

The Immediate Economy

The Immediate Economy (IE) book, 137p, Table of Contents and Introduction below?? might be emailed on request. You will probably get speedier service if you tell me who you are, and how you would like to take part in the projects presented on this site. The #-numbers refer to items in the book's Table of Contents.

The Reality of Money

Money is generally thought of as a valuable substance. It can be taken to shops and exchanged for goods with real value there. It can also be used to buy services - other people's work, and for rights - such as to live in a rented room for a month. Money as value stuff can be hoarded by hiding it under mattresses. It can also be lent with or without interest.

This sort of thinking made more sense when money was metal coins minted by monarch's treasuries than it did when it became paper bills with numbers and faces printed on them. Such pieces of paper are useless for any other purposes than proving that their owner has a right to obtain real value - such as goods in shops - whose total prices are equal to the sum of the numbers printed on the paper tokens. If those tokens were acquired honestly, the buyer gave real values to the rest of the economy whose total value, or price, was equal to the numbers printed on the tokens. Prices are measured in arbitrary units, $, €, £.. These differ from one economy to another, but must be used consistently within such economies to have meaning. Unit measures of value are thus comparable to unit measures of length - feet, meters. A $, €, £.. represents value - it is a symbol with no intrinsic value, just as a meter has no real length. The word 'water' (eau, mayu, pani, ab, voda...) quenches no thirst.

Paper money is a symbolic medium for communicating information about values just as a language is a symbolic medium for communicating information about other aspects of reality. This becomes more obvious when payments are made with credit cards and accounts are balanced daily. Then no material substance with supposed intrinsic value changes hands. The gap between giving real value to get symbols for value and exchanging those symbols for other real value shrinks as accounts are balanced more frequently and less money is saved.

Money is used for sharing as well as for exchanging rights to real value. A company may earn a great deal of money by selling a great many desirable goods, rights or services. That money symbolizes rights to other real goods, rights or services that the company's clients owe to its employees and other personnel for having made and sold them, and for having acquired the necessary equipment, buildings etc needed to do this. To be fair, the real value of the goods, rights or services owed to the company's employees, investors and other personnel (managers..) should be shared amongst them immediately as it is received in proportion to the value of their individual contributions to the company's total income. Such contributions can be services - management as well as labour, and they can be rights - to use tools, own land, use communication networks...

It is not only that company's employees and investors who deserve fair fractions of its income. Many other people worked to make that company's products. People probably traveled over roads to work there. Raw materials and semi-finished goods probably had to be delivered to it. The people who acquired and delivered those materials and goods should also earn fair shares of that company's income as they are received by the company. People had to be educated to know what to do in it, kept healthy and safe.. government, management, communications and banking services were needed to organize all these people in many ways.

Goods, rights or services have real value because they are desirable. When money has symbolic value only, payments for real value are not fair unless they are immediate. If payment is delayed, the buyer benefits from real value that belongs to the seller until the transaction is complete. When payment is immediate, the seller can immediately buy other real value and enjoy whatever makes it desirable - delay defrauds the seller of that real value. In a fair symbolic money economy the flow of symbolized value should match that of the real value; directions reversed.

When money becomes symbolic and has no intrinsic value, there is confusion the gap between giving real value of some kind to get symbolic money and giving those paper or number tokens to get other real value. This is a sort of double barter - real for symbolic for real. It implies double ownership. During the gap, the symbols are thought of as though they had real value - anyone who owns symbols can use them to acquire real value of equal price. There is thus one set of owned goods, rights or services with certain real desirability, and another owned set that is valuable because it can be exchanged for real value.

Symbolic-real value confusion has been used to acquire power since money was invented. Coins cannot be minted if their face values were smaller than their production costs. They are melted down if their face value shrinks below that of their metal content, More power is acquired creating symbolic tokens cost less and their face value is higher. Though this is a form of theft. Powers so acquired by an authority can be used to do things for the other members of the economy that they cannot do for themselves. That authority can tax the public to pay for public services - health care, education, justice, standards, research and much else, in a coherent way, such that all benefit by belonging to a single well-organised society.

The money-creating authority is under no obligation to use its powers for the public good. It can also use them to build private palaces and pleasure gardens - or to dupe the public into paying for huge quantities of weapons and kill itself in foreign wars, or to so manage the media that it believes it needs nuclear energy because global warming is caused by CO₂. Powers to create money also confer powers to decide what 'good' is, promulgate laws and punish evil-doers. The authorities that create money are above the law. Money is thus always created for the public good - even if the public is being taxed and tyrannized to death in several ways at once. Kings and presidents are unquestionably wise, just, benevolent, farsighted protectors of the people, defenders of the nation and the faith. They have the power to decree that anyone who disagrees with them is seditious, unpatriotic, guilty of treason, in need of imprisonment, torture, death..

Printing paper and lending or spending numbers into circulation is less bothersome than minting coins. In our times, banks and governments combine to regulate the economy for the 'public good'. Banks create money by lending more money and at higher interest rates than was deposited in them at lowers rates. Borrowers spend that money into circulation to build factories or found other enterprises. They owe borrowed moneys and interest to banks, own their buildings and enterprises, charge clients most, pay workers least, try to avoid taxes, and keep the difference for themselves as profits.

Company incomes are not distributed fairly to the individuals who contributed to the real values of their products and services in this arrangement. Workers real work has real value. It earns hardly more than inflation when deposited in banks - it loses value to inflation when hoarded as paper. While the real value is sterilized, borrowers' companies can make huge profits by investing the money they borrowed from the banks . The sterilized real value is exchanged for the properties, environment, organisation needed to make highly profitable industrial concerns. The continuous creation of new credit money that must pay interest increases the money supply exponentially.

Workers are weak and disorganized - unions are regularly infiltrated to make them bargain for wages rather than fair shares of company income. Fixed wages are always unfair. Fair distribution of joint income is in fair fractions of total income. Fairness is determined by bargaining until each realizes that he/she cannot get more for what he/she gives. This includes everyone in the economy - not just workers, investors and bosses. Everyone suffers from the inflation of the money supply and its devaluation - except the money creators. They use their control of the media to make it understood that inflation and depressions just happen - like the weather. "There is another depression rolling in. No, it's not a low pressure trough bringing rain and cold. But the expert economists at the national reserve bank know what they are doing. They will soon reduce its effects on the economy. ".

The experts decided that the economy was overheating. So the banks make no new loans, raise interest rates and oil prices, foreclose mortgages, and reduce payments to the government that has to raise taxes to do its job. Cooling depressions are fine weather for the money creators. When small companies go broke in droves and real estate prices plummet, the money managers can buy them up at bargain basement prices. The unemployed are also willing to accept any work to stay alive, assassinate unwanted politicians, risk death in foreign wars, sell drugs, or their bodies.. The boom promissed by the experts occurs when the experts decide the economy needs to be stimulated. So the money makers pump huge quantities of new money into it. Almost everyone can get loans at low rates under easy conditions. New factories are go up, unemployment dries up, prices and wages rise - the whole economy bathes in a cozy, rozy optimistic glow. When people are up to their necks in debt and debt money, the noose is pulled tight again. This sort of rock and roll is known as "fine tuning the economy". Real value raked in, then fake money is reeled out -presumably to boom and bust the economy to stability and prosperity..

Banks and borrower-bosses also cheat when they do not redistribute jointly earned incomes entirely, fairly and immediately to workers and others who contributed to those joint incomes. Companies pay a fraction of their gross incomes to governments as taxes and bribes, and repay debts to banks. Managers and investors keep more or less what they want for themselves and to invest in more efficient equipment, buildings etc - which will also belong to them. Large corporations can thus force small competitors into bankruptcy, buy them out, and grow some more as small farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, restaurants and other little people who are not in on the money creation game, but suffer from inflation and pay taxes, go broke. The large corporations then combine to holdings that manage agribusinesses, supermarket, hotel chains, key energy, transport, communications defense other industries that get large contracts from the government. Those contracts are paid by taxing the little people.

These enormous frauds would not be possible without the gap between the sale of jointly produced goods, rights or services and the complete, immediate and fair distribution of company income to all who contributed to providing them. That does not only include company managers, investors, workers, and all subcontractor employees. The whole economy can be compared to a single living organism with many interacting parts. In the ultimate analysis, everyone in the economicy in involved in the fair sharing of everything everyone makes, does, owns - for, and with, everyone else. A single pin prick can put a whole body in pain; a single beautiful view can give pleasure to the entire person. The is not something that economists, who think of money as something that has intrinsic value, understand. A different kind of thinking is required.

Tricksters in Trouble

The confusion between real and symbolic value is ceasing to be a means for acquiring wealth and power. The trick does not work if everyone can make worthless tokens and pass them off as though they had real high face values. A generation ago, it was quite easy to detect counterfeit bank notes and punish forgers. Now just about anyone with computer-scanner-printer setup can fake notes that have fake real value as well as the government-banking combine can. A cheap-numerically controlled die-casting and - stamping machine could produce coins at a fraction of what it costs to make the official ones - possibly from cheap garbage-gobbler metals.

Fake bills and coins might be recognizable. But there is no way of knowing whether numbers in peoples' computerized accounts were lent into circulation by officially accredited banks or not. Prices are also numbers. People can exchange goods, rights or services, and balance their prices in accounts on their home computers as freely, often and legally as they want to. Over- and under-drafts left when prices have been balanced could be settled with bank notes or transfers of number money.

There are cleverer way of doing this. The members of a community that balances accounts can jointly own, or buy, a real property such as a farm or an apartment building. Each individual member owns a share of the total value of that property base - perhaps the fraction of its price he/she paid for it, or inherited. Over and under-drafts are settled by adjusting base fractions after accounts are balanced. A debtor is an individual community member who bought more than he/she sold; a creditor sold more than he/she bought. Debtor base shares are adjusted downwards, creditor shares upwards. Total over- and under-drafts are equal. Base shares are real value - the total price value of what each member got during an accounting period is thus exactly equal to what he/she gave. If the base is sold, each member gets a fraction of the proceeds of the sale corresponding to his or her share of it. If the base earns some aggregate income - rent from a building, sales of farm products - each member earns fractions of that income as dividends corresponding to his/her base share.

Some members of the community could also work to increase its aggregate income - for instance to maintain the building and collect rents, or as labourers on the farm. A part of that community's aggregate income is entirely distributed as dividends to shareholders, the other part as salaries to workers every time accounts are balanced. Workers, will initially also be shareholders. They get both salaries and dividends as worker-investors. Deciding which part of the aggregate income should go to shareholders, and which to workers, should be less bitter than traditional capital-labour bargaining. Workers as a group, and investors as a group, bargain with each other to determine which parts of the joint income each group will receive. The sum of the two parts add up to 1 - no bosses, banks or governments cream anything off aggregate incomes before they are distributed to individuals. Worker-investors bargain as they please. Dividends are share fractions of the investors' part. Workers bargain amongst themselves to decide what fraction of the workers part each of them will get. Such a fraction depends on hours worked, particular skills and training, the danger of their work, unhealthy conditions, overtime etc. Hours worked, and over-time, can be measured - clock-in out; other factors adjusted as more or less automatically as required.

Some investors might increase their community's incomes by lending it more base properties - equipment, tools, land, buildings. This would be done with the approval of other members of the community, and with the understanding that those investors get their properties back according to the conditions under which they were made available to it. Loaned properties, or real values with identical prices, will be returned in any case if the community breaks up. Until then, the community's aggregate income will increase due to the new base properties. This increase raises the investors' part only, and that raise is distributed only to those investors who contributed the community's increased income in proportion to their individual contributions to it. Similar considerations apply to workers who work more hours, acquire new skills, do more dangerous or dirty work. This increases the workers part of the aggregate income, and that increase is entirely distributed to those workers whose additional work raised that part in proportion to the value of that work. Bargaining for fair parts and shares of parts can be at regular intervals or under unusual circumstances. The distribution of salaries and dividends is fairer when accounts and balanced and distributed more frequently (#4.6).

Powers acquired by creating money out of nothing are now used to enforce the payment of taxes for public services. This arrangement does not work well. The non-payment of taxes becomes a sort of hide-and-seek game between public and private sectors of the economy. Tax avoidance (legal) and evasion (illegal) becomes a fine art. Those artists who are most admired are those who pay least for public services and profit most from them - and usually benefit from money creation and other scams as well. Real public services health, education, caring for the environment and real justice are starved for funds. Public servants - school teachers, nurses.. tend to be underpaid and public universities, hospitals, water supplies, transportation systems etc., privatized. A little bribery usually helps wealthy corporations acquire shares in them cheaply, raise their prices, and reduce their services soon after.

Many people realize that public services are vitally necessary, and would gladly contribute to them - if they could be certain their contributions were used competently and honestly. They would also want to be sure that others were paying their fair share. For this to happen, individuals must be free to contribute as much as they want of their total income to the public services of their choice, the economy must be transparent, and people must be free to combine against those whom they know do not contribute fairly. When accounts have been balanced by totalling each person's sales and purchases, under and over-drafts are cleared by adjusting shares. Then dividends and salaries are summed into individual accounts. Each person can decide what fraction of that sum he/she wants to contribute to external services of his/her choice (#4.7). The account balancing program(#4.8) can combine such contributions and credit totalled contributions to those organizations within the community that perform those services.

Let us imagine a meta-community of many account-balancing communities (#4.6, #4.7, #5.3). Each community has certain members, and its own set of base properties, to perform certain services. The aggregate income of a given community is the sum of the combined contributions of all the other communities. They are all better served, and every member of each community earns more salaries and dividends, if each community improves the value of the services it offers the others. The members of any subset community can work, and own base shares, in any others - hence earn salaries and dividends there. Any member of any community can own a portfolio of shares in many bases and set rates at which he/she is willing to buy shares if he/she is a creditor when accounts are balanced, or sell shares if he/she is in debt. Such base share re-allocation can be done automatically with a stock-market algorithm when accounts are balanced.

A happier, healthier, juster, better educated and protected society that lives in more beautiful surroundings has more real value. As the quality of life there increases, so do the values of base components owned by members its subset communities and those of their work, creativity, organisation.. hence of their dividends and salaries. This arrangement for providing public services requires no intrinsic value money. There is no way of creating or counterfeiting money in it, other than hacking into computer files or programs. There is thus no enforced taxation, top down patriarchal power structuring, Big Daddies Commanding and Killing, Big Brothers watching, wiretapping, reading thoughts, controlling minds and managing opinions. Symbolic money counter-flows the real goods, rights or services provided. It is all cleared to zero, price for price, every time accounts are balanced. There can be no inflation in such an economy.

As the quality of life increases within such communities, people external to Tesla might want to live in them. The prices of services and properties there can be higher than they would be elsewhere. This also raises the values of bases, salaries and dividends within them. People outside them will be able to buy into them, for instance, by working for, or investing in them to acquire shares. They then earn salaries and dividends in it. The communities' base shares, and other goods, rights or services, might be bought with external paper and credit money. This is supposed to have intrinsic value, and it devalues with inflation. It can thus be treated as a rotting commodity within an IE and exchanged for goods, rights or services with real values outside it rapidly.

An IE suffers from none of the pathologies of intrinsic value money economies. No intrinsic value money can be created inside it. It does not suffer from the rift between cheats and cheated. None of its members energies' are wasted on internal conflict and protection racketeering. It is extremely coherent and can organise to protect itself very well from all possible dangers - corporate cheating, government-cartel bullying... environmental destruction. It has no inflation because real values are always exchanged immediately for other real values of equal price - there is no gap between giving and getting where fake real value can be smuggled into the system.

It is proposed that an IE's invariant unit measure of value be called the 'valar'. A valar has no more real value than the word 'water' quenches real thirst. It is simply an accounting symbol as words are communication symbols. Accounts are always balanced completely in an IE. No money with supposed intrinsic value gets stuck between the sales of jointly created real value, and the real value contributed to those sales by many individual people. All real properties are owned by real living people in the IE; none are owned unshared by corporations, companies, churches, and other fictitious entities. Such entities are symbolic accounting and organisational tools in the IE. They cannot, as such, have any legal rights within it. An IE is thus quite similar to the co-operative interaction between the organs within our own bodies and the cells within those organs. All of its members benefit if some function better, and all suffer if some are harmed they are incapacitated. As this is realized, cheating makes less sense.

It has been known almost since intrinsic value money was invented that it confers excessive powers on some people and robs others of their freedoms. Aristotle wrote that lending money at interest was unfair - this was known to the Babylonians thousands of years earlier. Attempts were made throughout history to live without it. In the 1920s and 30s people who wanted to live peacefully, simply, spiritually in contemplative communion with God - or sensually in communion with nature - tried to set up simple price-accounting shared property based communities similar to that described. One of them coined the term valar for its internal unit measure of value. Their leaders were hauled up in court for inciting tax evasion. If they tried to sell their farm- or handicraft products, they were underbid or harassed for unhygienic or non-standard produce. The cartel was concerned that such honest exchanging and sharing systems might spread. It needed the government to collect taxes to pay for its cannon, and to recruit young men as their fodder. Those little communities succumbed to the powers of the system they had sought to evade. It will not last much longer.

Capitalism is incompatible with computers. In the longer run, there will be no way managers of existing credit money systems will be able to prevent people from using their home computers to balance accounts, distribute joint incomes to individual people and to contribute to whatever causes they please. Being the only one to create intrinsic value money at low cost and high face value requires one or more supporting monopolies - if only to have the means to eliminate counterfeiters. Oil worked quite well for about a century. But it causes global warming. Many people are also realizing that we could always have had all the useful energy we needed at almost no cost, without any pollution or global warming and with distilled water as a byproduct. The money-makers thus need other monopolies - badly. Food and water seem to be good candidates - so efforts are underway to destroy some food supplies and to control others. Small successes were also achieved in cornering water supplies. The truly massive production of distilled water, food, fuel and fertilizers from the ocean will leave such scummy little scams in tatters. If the tricksters go on with their old trickery much longer, the top-heavy monster with a head of gold and feet of nothing will tumble down on them. The rest of the world should not regress into chaos when this happens.

Moving to our New Home

Eco-nomy means 'home-order'. An intrinsic value money economy is like a home in which dad issues as many buttons as he wants (counterfeiters are boiled alive) and pays his older sons to beat the other members of the family if when they do not obey his commands. He also feuds with is neighbours and taxes buttons from his family to arm his sons to fight them. It is time to move out of that sort of house. Humanity faces very serious challenges. Nature is getting fed up with the filth and heat we are dumping into the environment - we could succumb to climate change quite soon. Technologies for over-coming such dangers have been known for a long time - we never needed fossil or nuclear fuels. Others are available for making deserts bloom, feeding, fueling and housing everyone alive decently. But we are telling ourselves lies to prevent such things from happening, and wasting many of our resources to kill each other. There are also tremendous opportunities waiting for us if we find our way out of our violent, dishonest, confusion to a more living, loving order in the human home.

When the agreement that money has intrinsic value ceases to make sense, the social order can no longer be imposed with rigid laws and written commandments. It must be renewed continually, mutually and reciprocally. Such an arrangement is difficult to describe because it is at once as simple and complex as any living creature. We use words whose meaning is supposed to remain constant while the reality they re-present changes. We assume that our languages of few thousand words can map the whole universe. Its parts define each other, but are not separable from each other by any precise definitions. The universe is alive, fundamentally unknowable and unpredictable. Ultimate reality is beyond symbols. Life is renewed in the conjunction of opposites. Male and female, existence and non-existence, good and evil meet and beget each other.

The truth of what is at any place and time must be rediscovered in unprejudiced awareness then and there. There can be no set of symbols which prescribes right action other than that which ensues from such awareness. When truths discovered at some particular place and time are extended to others, they become lies. Life cannot be caught between the covers of a book, or trapped in the bits on computer disks. Symbols that program living minds kill them by turning them into computers that serve the purposes of their programmers. That is largely what propaganda, indoctrination and advertising are for. All legal, ideological, religious, scientific symbol systems can be used to indoctrinate, exploit and enslave. No messiahs can come to utter strings of words that describe how to create a free, fair living, loving world. The words of the man who said "love one another", "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you, Ye are gods" were used to build an organisation that acquired immense wealth and power by programming millions of people into zombiehood, instigating inquisitions against those who resisted, and to justify religious wars. Paradise does not come with expectations, prayers, jubilees or state planning. Charismatic dictators persuaded other millions that the 'worker's Paradise' was at hand if those millions would obey the dictators - and came closer to creating hell on earth.

All rigidly codified systems of law are at least partly unjust - hence destroy the living order they are supposed to preserve. The power to do this is still obtained by confusing the symbol for value with real value. The love that money once symbolized (#3.1.1) correctly has vanished. The real value of money was always more or less of a lie. It has now become a pure lie. A society that uses this lie to enforce its order has two floors. The authority that creates the money also lays down the law for those below who obey and pay taxes for it. The authority in the upper floor cannot remain there without the means and weapons to enforce its unjust form of justice. These are normally obtained by internal and external protection racketeering. This involves over-emphasizing the dangers of local criminals and foreigners, and hiding the dangers of conceding too many powers to the local authority. That authority alone must have the power to tax the rest and arm itself to protect the country from external enemies - and to remain in power internally by enforcing its justice unjustly. That injustice arouses hatred which is directed against external enemies who justify their protection rackets similarly. So the authorities, that run the mutually justifying protection rackets, cheat and steal astronomical sums from their own subjects, and use them to slaughter each other. Those subjects have almost no organisation, weapons or money to defend their rights.

A person can be killed just as dead by a megaton bomb sent over from another continent, as by a neighbour, or the bite of an infected bed bug. Real order would enable him/her to live longest, most enjoyably and intensely at least cost. A person only dies once, and a chain is as strong as its weakest link. Links in the chains of all possible dangers and all resources available for reducing the probabilities that they will occur vary continually. Bedbug bites may be harmless one day, deadly another. A living social organisation would enable its members to balance their needs (demand) with their abilities to satisfy them (supply) continually, on both the individual and global levels - with no authority above who decrees how the rest shall live.

A economy is not a machine with indicators, brakes and accelerators as boom-bust experts would have us believe. It is a living body with many living parts. Atoms combine to form molecules, cells, organs, living bodies. People combine to families, clans, tribes, nations, empires.. This fusion is accelerating irreversibly as middlemen between production and consumption become redundant. Travel agencies can pack up when people can use the internet to reserve the flights without getting out of bed. Supermarket chains and discount houses are no longer needed when producers can supply clients directly at their doorsteps much faster and more cheaply than they do now. Clients will order from home terminals - none of the bother of driving into town, parking (deflated tyres, mugged, shopping-cart stolen.. ). Computers can be programmed to survey markets, buy low, sell high, manage joint income distributions to individuals and combine their re-contributions far more fairly and efficiently than existing bankers, bosses and bureaucrats could. Management then becomes a creative art (#5.5, #5.6, #5.7). Frontiers are fading, and nation states are withering away, as banker-borrower brotherhoods cease to be able create bogus money value into their accounts. When globalization is complete, wars will make no sense. There will also be no way the hoods will be able to corrupt governments to borrow their money to buy their arms.

There will also be no money to fund internal colonization rackets with rigid systems of law cut to meet the needs of the money-makers, or to manage the media to get chosen lawmakers elected into power, or to play-nation states of against each other. Rigid national systems of law will be replaced by a single formalized dynamic fabric of agreements. That fabric enables each of its members at every sub- and super-set level on the whole planet to satisfy all of their needs with all of their resources, such that the subjective changing needs of each could not be better satisfied with the changing resources of all. Such a fabric of agreements will be necessary if we are to undertake large projects - make deserts bloom, bring the ocean to maximum fertility - without the strikes, bitterness and wars that the injustices of money creation now entail. It will enable us to prepare for rapid changes on a global scale - such an asteroid on course for the earth, without ignoring the possible dangers of neighbours, or bedbug bites. We will also want to organise adventures in inner and outer space

The component of the IE software package that enables its users to use all the price and other information in the system to create fabrics of agreements in known as the Generative Agreement (GA). It is the most important part of the package.

4.9 The Generative Agreement (GA)

The IE program package operates in a main node computer that also contains all of the package's programs and files. The GA interacts with its external users via terminal computers, identi-keys, sensors and servos. A terminal can contain IE files and programs, and be used for other purposes, such as word processing, internet, games etc. The IE appears on terminal screens as a virtual personality known as Ordifaye. In the cyberspace behind the screens, she is a re-entrant program that can serve many terminals at once.

A user logs onto the IE at terminal with an identi-key (#4.4). This is like a modern mobile telephone -it knows its owner by biometry the way a dog knows its master by the smell. It thus identifies its owner unambiguously. It can be clicked to buy goods in shops or from terminals, check in and out of work, and the like. Ordifaye appears when the user has identi-clicked the terminal. She asks him/her which of the IE services he/she wants to access. In many cases this will be the GA.

A sensor is any device, such as a video camera, water meter or bar-code reader that collects information in the outside world, converts it into computer format, and transmits it to the node or a terminal. A servo receives information from a computer and uses it to activate mechanisms in the outside world - open a valve, close a door, start and control an engine...

Users can mandate Ordifayes to bargain for them with other Ordifayes for instance in automatic auctions (E-Bay..), or with real individual users. Ordifayes will normally help users to compile agreement fabrics by doing file searches, checking for contradictions and inadequacies, incoherencies etc - and suggesting improvements

National constitutions are paper docu­ments that define how national laws will be defined. The GA similarly prescribes how its users formulate, use and annul agreements between each other. It has an internal programming language for de­fining electronic agreements known as ecords: elec­tronic accord records. Users begin to define agreements in e-pa­lavers with each other. They then enter into question-answer sessions with their Ordi­fayes to define and file them. Once such ecords have been ap­proved by all concerned, or their mandated representa­tives, they are activated, as required, for the functions they regulate.

Unlike national constitutions, the GA has no moral­iz­ing purpose. Its users are totally free to agree to do what­ever they want to do together. They can agree to co-oper­ate, be sharing and caring; or to disagree and cheat, kill each other in any way they want to. The GA is an or­gan­izational tool that helps them to do what they jointly agree to do very efficiently. What they want to do, and can do, is ultimately a matter of matching their needs and abilities to satisfy them (#5.4, #5.5). Ecord fabrics define and represent the IE's sub- and super-setting structures (individuals, departments, companies, communities.. (#5.3).

The GA normally creates three versions of an ecord. One is electronic for IE internal use. The other two are in written print-out, and spoken acoustic, formats. When ecords are ready for approval, the individual users con­cerned are normally requested to append their graphic and acoustic signatures - these may be pre-recorded and would be protected (#6.14). Users participating in an ecord will, in any case, be required to identi-click (#4.4) their approval. Users can mandate other users to represent them in ecord defini­tion and approval. Such a mandate is itself a mini-ecord. Mandatees and mandators must be logged in, identi-click and sign approvals. Mandates will normally be restricted in scope, duration and appli­cability- May only represent me in affairs pertaining to (Company-X, animal pro­tection...). A user might mandate ecord accep­tance powers to some managers of a department where he/she works. Some people might want to for­malize their com­mitments to each other by swearing on a holy book, praying together, holding hands in solemn assembly in particularly beauti­ful natural settings (power places) and imagining the futures they want to create.

IE file formats are known (#6). They can thus be processed in standard ways by ecords composed of stan­dardized regulations. Ordifayes ask standardized ques­tions of users and insist on answers that can be translated into standardized programs and data. The GA uses standardized answers and information from IE files to build ecords the way a compiler program converts instruc­tions coded in a programming language (ex BASIC) into machine lan­guage. Computers only understand ma­chine language. An ecord is a series of regulations as a computer program is a series of instructions.

Some management tools, such as the Project Evalua­tion and Review Technique (PERT) can be used to su­per­vise activities of people and machines, and the utili­zation of resources available to them. Once a project's activities, and the people and resources necessary to complete them, are known, the project can be started, and information on its progress reported to the PERT program that monitors it. This makes it possible to pre­dict the consequences of delays, breakdowns, strikes.., and to reassign people and resources so as to reduce their impacts on final activity termina­tions, deadlines and budg­ets. Ecords are comparable to PERT networks; regulations inside them to activities.

The Account Balancing Run is a complex ecord fabric that is normally activated when a node's internal clock strikes midnight. One of the first things this ecord does is to acti­vate regulations that inhibit access to those parts of those files that are used or modi­fied during the Balanc­ing Run. An person's death might activate an in­heritance distribution ecord. An ecord might be activated by a sensor detecting a fire.

IE users need not be concerned with regulation for­mats. Ordifayes ask them questions and build ecords composed of many regulations automatically. Regula­tion structure is discussed to explain how the GA works. Regulations have a standard format: (Name) activat­ing conditions,/ activation parameters,/ Op­eration/, resul­tant parameters,/ resultant conditions.

Activating conditions are usually determined by Ordi­fayes and pre­ceding regulations. They can be related by Boolean op­erators. The regulation is activated if they yield YES. Ex­ample: (IF) (c1):drought (AND) ((c2): leaves yellow (OR) ((c3): leaves brown (THEN) ((Op):water tree). (c1), (c2) and (c3) are activation con­ditions. (Op) is the operation/task to be performed. Acti­vation conditions might all be acti­vated. This re­sults in a command. The regulation then states water tree in any case. Activation conditions can all be de-activated im­plying a non-com­mandment. Do not ever water tree. Moses' last 5 com­mandments are non-commandments: Thou shalt not...

Activation Parameters specify how a regulation should be executed. Like activation conditions, they are often set by previous regulations and Ordifayes. A search might be rapid or detailed; certain fields in records might be ac­cess protected. A message might need to be encrypted or decrypted according to a parameter.. sent to one set of terminals or another.

The Operation is the task to be performed. The number of different types of operation that the GA can perform will be limited. An operation is a program that knows what it has to do from its activation conditions and pa­rameters. An operation might be: Sort a file - parame­ters would indi­cate which file on what fields. Another operation might be Search two files to find matching fields. Yet another: IF (Activat­ing conditions) THEN GO TO (name1) else GO TO (name2). Name1 and name2 are regulations else­where in the same ecord, or in other ecords. An operation normally sets Re­sulting Pa­rameters and Conditions elsewhere in the same ecord or in other ecords. Regulation names (ad­dresses) are com­piled into the other regulations that refer to them.

Resultant Parameters,/ Resultant Conditions are set as the regulation is executed.

A Regulation's Name is normally assigned by the GA when it builds an ecord. The GA also gives each new ecord a number. IEs and nodes within multi-nodal IEs are num­bered. This makes it possible to tie all the ecords in any set of IE communities together in an ecord fabric. Ecords and regulations inside them would probably also be identified by time and place of approval, approving entities, etc., to ease rapid access and indexing.

An ecord is a series of regulations defining tasks to be performed by the GA that is itself an ecord manage­ment and interpretation program package. It can be compared to a series of tasks given in a precise, dense language to be performed by some-one; also how those tasks should be performed. The instruction: Water the tree if its leaves are dry or brown would become ecord:

Regulation 1 (no activator) (Op: Interrogate humid­ity sensor)/ (resultant conditions set in Regulations 2, 3 and 4: ((c1): sensor not responding); ((c2): sensor indi­cates hu­midity below normal); ((c3): sensor indicates humidity above normal).

Regulation 2 (activator (c1): sensor not responding) / ((Op): send message and ring a bell at maintenance company terminal)

Regulation 3 ((c2) activator: humidity below nor­mal) AND NOT (irrigation valve open) (Op: control sequence to servo motor to open irrigation network valve)

Regulation 4 ((c3) activator: humidity at or above normal) (Op: control sequence to servo motor to close irriga­tion network valve) (activated condition: stop)

Regulation 5 (no activators) (Op: Interrogate irrigation valve open or closed)

Regulation 6 (activator: NOT stop) ((Op): Loop back to regulation 1)

Regulation 7 (No activator) (Op: control sequence to turn irrigation valve off)

When one ecord has completed, it activates the next in sequence. These can be prioritized by setting activa­tors. Low priority search, update and calculation ecords could be run at night or during weekends; high priority searches for dangerous mate­rials sales to dangerous people..), every hour. Some ecords would be able to interrupt others (to send earth­quake, tsunami warnings...). Several ecords could be processed more or less simultaneously, especially if parallel processors are available. Ecords can be self-modifying and self-annul­ling - permission to do this might be required from the users concerned.

Most ecords (company foundation, payment order contractual defini­tions..) will be built from standard model ('template') ecords. This makes it possible to check them individu­ally and together for contradictions and incoherencies within and between them. An ecord is self-contradic­tory if one of its regulations stipulates that a tree must be watered at the same time that another stipulates that it should not be watered. A personnel file is incoherent if one has only record stating that A is father of B; another that B is father of A. When the GA sets up a marriage contract, it can check if a man is not remarrying the same woman without an intervening divorce. An ecord is incomplete if one of its regulation states that a tree must be watered; none under what con­ditions by whom, or when.

Logic is one thing, compatibility another. It would be possible to search the property file (#6.9) for all pieces of land that have no, or several, owners, or for sewage out­lets the lead into drinking water inlets. The GA might find reasons why partnerships might not work - or work well. Contingency checklists can be es­tablished for founding various kinds of company (does a fruit farm need irrigation, does it have the right kind of soil for the trees? Will temporary help be needed at harvest time?...)

An ecord that has not yet been approved by all con­cerned, is a sort of working document that can help them to agree better and faster. As yet unborn ecords are placed in a file together with those that have been approved, but may not have been activated. As palavers are under way, partici­pants can ask their Ordifayes to search IE files for relevant data (Who was in on the last ecord? Is the land being sold close to a river?...). As work to­ward final agreement pro­gresses, the Ordifayes can use the GA can check for ecord in­co­herencies and inconsisten­cies - also with other ecords (You are planning a 6 sto­rey building in a region where zoning laws specify no more than 4). They can also begin to form draft agreements between each other - if users have not already done this, and to suggest improvements if they have. If users are planning to form a company, the GA can perform mar­ket surveys to to esti­mate how much each individual member of that company earn... scan the properties file for suitable compo­nents..., look for po­tential inves­tors... Such services would belong to kits or tem­plates that are used to formulate different stan­dardized types of company ecord (farm, bakery, aircraft, environment protection services... #5.5), con­tract (marriage, payment, employment, investment...)

Ecord construction may require establishing Trans­par­ency-Confidence restrictions (#6.14). Who would be mandated by whom to access or modify sensitive data? Pass through certain doors? Operate certain equip­ment...? Some ecords might refer to stan­dards and norms in the SN file (#6.13), or create others there for their own use. One company might prefer to use Stan­dard In­ternationale (m, kg) units; another English units (ft, lb). The GA could be asked to make ecords for con­verting measurements in one system into another. The members of one company might agree on Christian holi­days, another on a Muslim, Buddhist or 13month lunar calendar.

An ecord could be so constructed that it tells users when they can meet to work together. Some ecords could define norms for hospital personnel (wash hands before entering oper­ating room!) or construction work­ers (wear helmet under crane!). The difference between paper instructions and ecords is that ecords can tell some people (via identi-keys, terminals..) and control sensors to check if others actually do wash their hands and wear their helmets when they should - and activate exception procedures when they don't. A worker's Ordifaye might call a construction worker on his identi-key to tell him: This is the third time video cameras sensed you under a crane without a helmet. If he does it again, his salary will be reduced, the reduction split equally, and added to other workers' salaries - as per ecords he approved when he was hired. Many such stan­dards and norms could be scanned off existing paper documents and converted into ecords semi-automatically.

Once an ecord is complete, clean, and all concerned, or their mandators, have checked them out and identi-clicked, graphic and acoustic signed them to formalize their approval, the ecord is registered. Registering a company involves inserting it into the company files (#6.3 - #6.7...) open­ing its accounts, and adding an activator to the Account Balancing Run so that it is processed like others companies, and can be disactivated - for instance if the company reverts to a virtual state (#6.3).

Classical PERT projects are processed in isolation. The GA could treat a company like an ongoing project. It could monitor when people arrive at work and leave again, re­mind them when machines need preventive maintenance, control servos that check qualities of raw materials, semi- and finished products, make decisions what to do when people call in sick, machines break down, customers or suppliers change their minds, storms approach.. and re­calculate consequences on budgets, deadlines, etc. Nu­merous Ordifayes of many companies could inter-act to enable them to buy and sell, co-operate and compete most effi­ciently (#5.4, #5.5). Each node has a single GA that con­trols as many Ordifayes as are needed to serve online us­ers. Inter-nodal commu­nications would probably be via the internet and other existing means until multinodal IEs develop (#5.3)

The GA has several procedures that allow its users to combine to heal pathological behaviour. One of them is tariffs (#4.10). Say some one's Ordifaye reveals that Mr X contributed nothing to environmental protection, and little to other public services. This person could convince other people and companies to set high sales tariffs on all goods, rights or services they sell to Mr X. Their added income from sales to Mr X will be contributed to environmental protection and other public services that the tariff setters want to help. Tariffs are associated with messages that can be read by all of the IE's users. Mr X and his friends could set tariffs against the tariff-setters. That will do him no good if he has few friends and has, in fact, been spending most of his income on himself. He will then contribute more, either directly or indirectly.

The IE can be used to set up legal systems with policemen, detectives, arbitrators, lawyers, judges and retributors (#5.6) who reward or punish according to judgements. Such justice is a public service. Its funding is basically voluntary. Tariffs and other expedients can be used by majorities to get minorities to contribute fairly. But such justice a system easily becomes a racket. When policemen start running protection-prostitution rackets, and spending worthless tokens into circulation so others can pay for their services, they are starting a new intrinsic value money economy. It is now fairly well known what sort of justice that leads to.

There is no way of preventing some men from wanting to acquire power over others. A society may need a single chain of command that responds with speed and secrecy if that society is in conflict or danger (approaching asteroid..). This usually requires according a great deal of power to a single leader or to a small junta - they are presumably the ablest, wisest, most intelligent people available for the job. A monopoly to lead becomes a racket when it starts to exploit those led for its own benefit. Leaders deserve compensation equal to the relative value of their services. They tend to become useless parasites once their services are no longer needed, or when they start to over-charge for those services. Practically all community services can become rackets - one of the oldest is irrigation - and, indirectly, nutrition via farms that depend on it. Now we have genetic modification, starvation and codex alimentation. Health can be racketted for hospitalization, medication (enforced vaccination, hypocratic operation, sterilization and elimination). Salvation can be racketted for indoctrination, stupidification, inquisition. Industrialization rackets consumption, transportation and power generation that spread pollution and desertification. Communication and computation are being used for domination, extortion and infiltration by wire-tapping and brain-washing . And so it goes.

There is usually an element of foolish good-naturedness in the people who allow exploited, then enslaved, by rackets. Provisions can be made before a war begins for deposing, or disposing of leaders of unnecessary power once it is over. The GA's mandation procedures will normally include de-mandation. This can be automatic and agreed on by all belligerents. War over: generals pensionned, arms industries on stand-by. We might not now be in danger of collective nuclear extermination if such agreements had been made before WWII. That would probably have been impossible given the way wars were engineered in the 20^th century.

Professional do-gooders tend to become public nuisances. They must be dealt with as soon as their powers begin to become pathological. That is when known symbolized 'good' eclipses real good of which the community is not aware. The IE helps its users to realize when some links of all possible gains get more resources than are needed while others are starved of funding. It is possible to combine against incipient rackets by not paying any more for any services than they are really worth compared to all others, and by taking all possible risks into consideration.(#5.6, #5.7). It is also possible to set up competing services whenever small monopolies start to become big rackets. Though the IE can help alert its users to the dangers of racketeering, and to deal with them efficiently, machines are not creative or intuitive. It is ultimately up to living people to realize when their social order is beginning to slip out of balance and re-med-y (re-balance) the situation creatively.

The GA cannot eliminate murder, theft, rape or other so-called crimes. What it can do, is to help its users create an order in which they can so balance their resources that the dangers and costs of being a-bombed to from another continent, killed by a neighbour, or infected by a bedbug are comparable. All concerned can invest their resources to lose least and gain most taking all possible resources, gains and losses into account. The less they are racketted, the more freedoms, time, enjoyment of living they gain. This implies never allowing any power to percolate 'up' any higher than necessary.

Natural balances include murder, theft, cheating, rape. When wolves eat rabbits that eat grass, all remain in healthy balance. Male rivalry is necessary if the fittest are to survive most. Animals, even of the same species, do steal from each other. Cats 'cheat' by hiding behind rocks to catch mice - many parasites cheat far more cleverly to get into hosts and live inside them. None of this is anybody else's business.

The IE can help do away with all of the cheating and corruption of intrinsic value money - hence eliminate the dangers of environmental collapse. It can also create a World Without War (#5.7) in which there is least suffering and killing. We could be producing abundant water, food, energy, fertilizer, living space.. if we were not wasting our effort, creativity, intelligence in useless conflict and confusion. Even so, there will come a time when the earth will not be able to carry more human beings in balance with other species. Zero population growth would imply weeding out more of the least viable - as in nature. We might also carry earth life elsewhere in the universe.

Such efforts to enter outer space could be more successful if preceded by adventures into inner space. Our minds are now much cluttered with junk - indoctrination, advertising, propaganda - some subliminal, much instilled into us from the moment we are born by inducing and exploiting fears, ambitions, neuroses, complexes, self-conflicts and psychoses. The racket with which the racketeers fill our minds will subside as we balance all accounts and purposes in our societies more continuously and completely. Our minds might then occasionally enter that state of junk-free, unprogrammed awareness in which telepathic communication with the life around us becomes possible. Telepathic internet-working between many species, possibly even crystals and other inanimate substances, could form an earth body that is vastly more capable of spreading its life into the universe than humanity alone would be. That journey begins by programming systems like the IE, and forming small communities that use prices, but no money with intrinsic value.

The book. Table of contents

The Book Introduction

This dawn of the third millennium is a time of danger and opportunity. The environmental crisis - global warming, desertification, rising sea levels - is related to our economic crises. Many nations have astronomical public debts. Health, education and other public services are deteriorating there - sometimes to the point of breakdown. There is also reason for hope. New data processing and transmission technologies are giving the planet a common nervous system. Genetics, microbiology, information- bio- and nano-technologies are combining in wonderful and awesome ways. Breakthroughs in the production of useful energy from ambient heat and ether make it possible to reforest deserts cheaply as well as to produce vast amounts of food, fertilizer and clean energy out in the ocean [240]. Such energy could also be used for cheap, reliable air and space travel. More people are realizing that the earth is one and fragile, and that humanity must treat it more responsibly.

Our difficulties could be harbingers of happier, more creative times. Things rarely worsen indefinitely. The longer and colder nights at the onset of winter do not cause dismay because it is known that the earth will soon warm again. A fertile time will come when new life blooms after winter has eliminated some of its more decayed and useless forms. The rebirth of the light was celebrated since prehistoric times.

The present the work contains a message of hope. It shows that our crises could be momentary and educational. A far juster (#5.6), more harmonious and enduring future is possible. Contemporary warfare is unnecessarily cruel and destructive. Violence in human society can be reduced to the functions it has in nature - maintaining natural balances, eliminating decay and degeneration (#5.7).

Whether we succumb to the dangers that now threaten our survival, or take full advantage of the opportunities becoming available us, depends on how clearly we think and honestly we communicate - hence on the way we use symbols. It was not so very long ago, geologically speaking, that our ancestors developed complex languages. It will be shown that our crises are largely due to a habitual confusion between our symbols and the realities they represent. It appears obvious that the word blue does not itself have color. It is less obvious that the numbers in our computerized bank accounts have no intrinsic value. They represent value.

Our confusion between what really has value for us because we really need it to live, and our symbols for value, has prehistoric origins. It is more easily understood by studying communities whose economies continue to be based on customary sharing and exchanging rather than on monetary transactions. Members of a family generally understand that life is pleasanter if they are nice to each other. Mutual trust and affection help them to confront difficulties, and to benefit from opportunities, together. They keep their home clean and garden pretty because life is more agreeable that way. One can `derive pleasure from giving pleasure to other people and earning their gratitude and respect in return.

Unnecessary nastiness weakens a family's cohesiveness and endangers everyone. It is in everyone's interest to prevent squabbles and jealousies from weakening family unity - hence to discuss causes for discord until agreements are reached in which everyone is reasonably sure that his or her needs could not be better met in the context of what he or she has to offer the others. Such needs are often altruistic - people tend to want to protect the weak and helpless, babies and invalids, animals and plants, and to strive for a balanced order between each other and with other species. The need for justice goes beyond egoism. Customarily organized tribes are comparable to large families. Their members spend much time in palavers deciding who does, gives, gets what. These rights and obligations evolve from a need for fairness such that each, and all, benefit most.

This does not exclude disagreement - brawls, tribal wars. However, such disputes can be conducted in such a way that new alliances under new agreements are easily formed. They often imply new organizations and responsibilities. This is usually as necessary for societal renewal as mutual creative consumption in plant and animal species. Renewal is part of the fun of living. It implies replacement of those forms of life that would perpetuate the same organizations and organisms in dull repetitiousness.

The use of objects as bearers of meaning antedates writing. In general, such objects were not supposed to have much intrinsic value. Cuneiform marks in wet clay could be made more permanent by baking the clay to brick. Jewels and statuettes made of beautiful, non-corroding metals served as tokens of respect (medals...). They circulated little since respect is personal. Amulets and talismans were used to symbolize affection and commitment. In time, they became coins - bearers of value that circulated between people through space and time forming that medium of exchange known as 'money'.

The generalized use of heterogeneous pieces of metal as value bearers was instituted in the Middle East by institutions where they were initially given as proof of lasting affection and admiration. The recipients of these tokens were often women. They were understood to personify the fertility of nature, the earth and universe (#2.1). The women who received these tokens then gave them to men to do beneficial things with such as increasing the fertility of the land by digging irrigation canals, helping widows and orphans and the like. When men again gave the tokens to women as proof of affection in love temples [100], [580]26 they started to circulate between members of the community.

These temples became brothels when entrance fees were collected at their doors. The establishment's management kept a part of the receipts for itself. The rest served to keep it going - especially to protect the women inside from customers who did not want to pay the fees. The monopolization of the women to benefit from mens' natural tendencies to love women and want to care for their families was the beginning of the state and its systems of justice based on the injustice of the monopolized control of money.

Those men who controlled other men's natural needs to renew life accumulated large harems, much wealth and power. Powerful men no longer needed other peoples' respect and loyalty in order to command and exploit them. They paid other men to enforce whatever order they wanted by defining laws, spying on them, threatening and punishing those that did not obey them. The rest of the community could also be induced to accept their institutionalized injustice by divine intervention. Priests could be paid to explain to ignorant masses that their Lords were Gods whose commands had been dictated from heaven, and that those who did not obey them would roast in hell forever. Such organizational tools served to strengthen the systematic exploitation of the small and weak by the high and mighty.

The Great Lords cared as little for the beauties of nature as for the sufferings of their subjects. If there was money to make by cutting forests down, their slaves could be ordered to do it. Single men were told to satisfy their needs for female company elsewhere by raiding other tribes for their material wealth and slaves of both sexes. The females filled private and public pleasure palaces; the males were put to work making arms and building fortifications - and paid enough to keep them satisfied making more slaves in public pleasure places.

It was the beginning of the protection racket system. Men had to be forced to make weapons and fortresses to protect communities against external aggression. Forcing them to do this required oppressive systems of internal order. Potentates bullied retainers into obedience; judges, policemen, hangmen, priests helped them to control the rest of the population with monopolized brutality. It was also the end of the order based on the mutual respect of people for each other and their natural environment. The tokens of affection and respect for the female creative principle had become tools of their oppression and destruction. Recollections of this replacement of real by symbolic value are recorded in Bible. It was the fall from paradise (#3.1).

Economies based on metal tokens became more systematically unjust when issuing them became a state monopoly. Printing a banknote with a very large face value costs very little. The organization that prints it is enriched by the difference between its symbolic face value and its production cost. This organization then spends that difference into circulation in whatever ways it wants to. Ostensibly, this is always for the good of the people; essential for running the state... Initially, when the printing starts, newly created money often does serve to create internal order, pay for external conquests, organize public services, subsidize technical progress and much else that is beneficial for the community (#3.2).

That economy gangrenes as the effects of the injustice spread through it. Newly created money pays for the tax legislation and collection machinery to pump already created money back out of the economy into the coffers of government. The rich and powerful become hostages of their protection and espionage services - hence racketted themselves. Civil servants live off taxes - hence use their powers to raise taxes so as to earn more and increase their job security. Bureaucracies expand, become corruptible and useless (#3.3). Social cohesion is exhausted, society crumbles in civil war, fragments into provinces or is conquered externally by societies that are not as rotted by the lie that money has intrinsic value. This rise and fall of civilizations has been going on since state money was invented.

It thus seems important to ask if it is not possible to have the best of both worlds. The harmony which reigned before love gifts degenerated into money and the theoretical abundance and technical expertise that monetary civilizations created later. The answer is: 'yes'. As more accounts in an economy are balanced more continuously and completely, money's function as a bearer of value fades away (#4). What remains, is an economy that has prices but no money as pseudo-substance with pseudo-value which one can lend with, or without, interest, hide under one's mattress or invest in companies (#4.2). Such an Immediate Economy is a renewal of the customary order based on freely concluded agreements. Its unit measure of value is defined in terms of the prices all goods, rights or services for sale in the economy and prices are expressed in terms of that unit. The meaning of a word is similarly defined in the contexts in which it is used, and the meanings of sentences, chapters, books implied by the words they contain.

So cleansed of the evil of its origins, money becomes a very powerful organizational tool (#4, #5). It then helps people to make, and abide by, agreements far more efficiently than is possible with legal systems paid for by cheating the population by creating money. All the powers of modern information technology are available to help people to keep to their commitments to each other.

By distributing all the incomes of companies and other collectivities quasi-continuously directly to their real living members, doorway deductions at source for institutional managers and official freeloaders are eliminated (#4.6). Enabling living people to contribute as they please to the collectivities that provide services, including those now called 'public', makes it possible to organize all services which people do for each other on the basis of reciprocal voluntary control - as in a family or tribe (#4.7).

Such distributions and contributions are usually fractions of earnings: each member of the economy gains or loses together with all the others. It is thus in people's obvious interest to be honest and friendly with each other. Without the injustice of money creation and the monopoly to torture, murder, imprison called 'justice' that it pays for, a society becomes very strong. There is no need for people to hate managers who do all they can for them when people can ensure that their managers never get more than they deserve. Trashing nature to raise profits no longer makes sense. Benefits derived from nature are in kind. People become wealthier in the beauty, diversity and health of their surroundings rather than in numbers in quarterly earnings reports. They increase the quality of their own lives by increasing that of other species (#5.4 - #5.5).

Every non-monetary family and tribe needs procedures for resolving disputes and restoring reasonably fair balances between its members. Non-monetary justice is not coded in letters that kill by programming people like automatons. Custom is a continually renewed living tissue of agreements that reinforces and preserves the life of the community. Each member takes part in weaving this network of agreements, and has a place in it. Such mutual regulation and definition of functions can be formalized and computerized to enable any community to retain a continuously renewed dynamic balance between its members (#4.8, #4.9, #5.6).

The discussion of a computerized non-monetary economy is necessarily technical. The proposed system (#4) would be easier to use than most home banking terminals. Monetary terminology still applies - with minor redefinitions of those few terms that now imply the intrinsic value of money. Though abundant use of acronyms and technical jargon is made in #4, most readers will skim through it so as to understand the system's operation intuitively - just as most people use the internet without knowing what URL, LAN and .TXT mean.

People who organize themselves to tell each other economic truths, and to share profits or losses of joint effort honestly, form much more unified communities than those that were corroded by the injustices of intrinsic value money. Being juster, they are more peaceful. They do not need external dangers to distract their members from internal injustices. Being better organized than monetary economies, they can deal more effectively with infiltrators, spies, terrorists and money-managed mind manipulators.

When money is no longer used as though it had value, people regain mastery over their economic symbols. These then help them to form freer, fairer and more dynamic societies than is possible with pieces of inert metal or paper. Computerized immediate economies can outsmart and overcome others that are still monetary (#5.7). The masters of monetary economies need to maintain their monopolies to issue money and prevent others from doing what they do. In olden times, lords of lucre preserved their privileges by controlling other men's' access to women; nowadays they use energy monopolies. The old metal monetary system deeply wounded us in heart (#3.1.7); the new credit money system destroys nature as well (#3.6).

The Immediate Economy is taking over everywhere in spite the efforts of the old monetary powers' to stop it. The more people balance accounts, the less they need state or bank issued money. Multinational companies finance themselves and balance accounts directly between each other without paying taxes. They reinvest receipts immediately to avoid the effects of inflation. They use the names of national currencies, not of their value bearing functions. As the world becomes non-monetary, it would be in these companies' own immediate interests to establish a juster, more efficient order between themselves. It this increasingly computerized world, that order can only be the Immediate Economy.

Nation States are increasingly broke and incapable of raising taxes from multi-nationals and non-governmentals, or of imposing any kind of law on them. They are thus reduced to gouging the small, disorganized and weak within their frontiers - craftsmen, workers, peasants, small companies.. - who have no way of avoiding inflation or creating money themselves. Anti-monopoly laws oblige them to remain disorganized and at the mercy of the people who create money and laws more or less as they please. Additional taxes and public debts needed to control the frustrated poor impoverish and anger them further.

Monetary economies become unstable as gaps rich between and poor widen. The decline of civilization and destruction of nature will be ended by living in reality and discarding illusions based on the long gone intrinsic value of money. Modern science is now showing us that this reality is a great deal more magical than the mechanistic old world-view had us believe. We left the first non-monetary economy as creatures. We return to the new one as creators (#5).

A slideshow that illustrates the system's most significant aspects is planned. This will later be adapted for publication on this site.

The system is being programmed as a computer game by Dr Barry. J. Ferrier bazmahti@hotmail.com">bazmahti@hotmail.com. If you are interested in the Immediate Economy and have computer skills or would like to invest in the project, you might contact Barry. Contributors will be compensated in real value pro rata value of contributions.

It is intended that it will also become the internal accounting system of Rainmaker Associations. It may then be made available to organizations affiliated with them.

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