Douglas Rushkoff – “Print Your Own Money”

Print Your Own Money

Everyone seems to want to know about the economy these days, so we may as well go there. It’s as great an example as any of a program that not only got out of control, but became so prevalent – so accepted – that we came to take it for granted. We think of the economy and its rules as given circumstances, when they are actually constructions.



The invention of centralized, national currency was meant to support all this. Where localities had previously been free to mint their own currency based on the crops they had grown, now they were forced to borrow money from a central bank. This allowed the issuer of currency – the crown – to extract value from every transaction. Anyone who wanted to buy anything from anyone else had to run it through the central authority – coin of the realm – one way or the other.

This engendered competition for money, which was now a scarce currency issued at interest, instead of a local currency as abundant as the year’s crop. Moreover, any business wanting to borrow money for equipment or development had to pay back several times what they had borrowed. This meant bankruptcy was built into the currency system. If a business borrows $100,000, for example, they’ll have to pay back $300,000 by the time the loan is due. Where does that money come from? Someone else who borrowed.

Meanwhile, local currencies had the opposite bias of centralized currency. Local currencies lost value over time. They were really just receipts on the amount of grain that farmer had brought to the grain store. Since some of that grain was lost to rats or water, and since the grain store had to be paid, money devalued each year. This meant the money was biased towards being spent. That’s why reinvestment in infrastructure as a percent of total revenue was so high in the late Middle Ages. It’s why they built those cathedrals. They were local efforts, by people looking to invest their abundant wealth into real assets for their communities’ future. (Cathedrals were built to attract pilgrims and tourism.)



Today, in essence, the central bank lends money to a federal bank, which loans it to a regional bank, and so on, each bank paying interest to the bank above, and charging more to the one below. By the time the person or business who needs the money gets it, they’re paying an awful lot of interest – so much, that it amounts to a drag on their ability to do business. The speculative economy, rather than fueling the real economy, drags it down.

The only way for banks – who run such an economy – to make more money is to lend more out. So they looked for more borrowers, as well as more places to park their cash. As a result, the things you and I depend on in the real world became investment vehicles. Homes, oil, resources…you name it. So the costs of all these things went up not because of any real laws of supply and demand, but because they had become new classes of investment.

As for finding new borrowers, well, that’s why Bush kept talking about “home ownership” as the right of every American, why lending standards were lowered and, of course, why bankruptcy for individuals was made so much harder. They wanted to lend more money, but didn’t have any more qualified borrowers. By changing bankruptcy laws, they meant to make it impossible for borrowers to cry uncle. (This was a 150-million-dollar lobbying effort by the credit industry, over the course of an entire decade.)

Eventually, the tension between the speculative economy and the real economy simply had to become too great. Lending money, in itself, doesn’t actually produce anything. On the contrary, it strains those few who are still attempting to produce things. It’s what turned so many companies into balance-sheet-driven outsourcing operations. Only so many bankers and investors can be supported by industry and homeownership.

We’re not really watching an entire economy fail. We’re watching a particular program fail. Only because it’s not sandboxed like a bad plug-in in Google’s Chrome browser, the resource leak sucks money from everywhere.


The collapse of centrally controlled commerce and currency simply creates an opportunity for local commerce and currency to revive. For people to learn to work and live together on a human, local scale – as the original free market advocate, Adam Smith, actually suggested. Admittedly, this would be a painful transition for many – but it’s better than maintaining dependence on a fiscal system designed from the start to turn people and communities into extractable corporate assets. (Think about that the next time you’re called up to “human resources.”)


For starters, check out the LETS system and other complementary currencies for how to make your own currency, Bernard Latier’s book The Future of Money free online, and Local Harvest for Community Sponsored Agriculture opportunities near you.


Published in: on September 23, 2008 at 9:22 PM  Leave a Comment  

The URI to TrackBack this entry is:

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: