If governments were not taxing people, people would not use the currency. So the government owned central bank can print as much money as it wants, it is not going to fund public services. Which shows fairly well when you compare tax revenue with government spending. Countries usually run a deficit of 2-5%points, but it is pretty close.

However you suggest to not have a central bank at all and you are also against taxes and any other form of coersion to fund public services. So I have to ask: How? There are some charities doing good work, but in terms of money it comes not even close to what is needed to fund infrastructure, schools, public welfare and so forth. The only thing able to do it, is to have large parts of the countries economy be state controlled and the profits from that are used to fund the government. If anything that is even worse, then having just taxes.

As for 3rd world countries, they have low taxes, but they also have low government spending. Also they are 3rd world countries, which ususally refers to countries, which are not doing too well.

For example the leverage banks are allowed to have is more like 1:10, meaning they can increase the money supply tenfold or so. It also doesn’t have to be backed by other customer’s money at all.

Banks nearly never actually go for the 1:10 limit. The bank usually gives the loan, then the bank tries to find the money for the reserve requirment. However the limit is how risky the loan is and not the reserve requirement. Customer deposits are one of the ways to meet those reserve requirements.

In general, increasing money supply isn’t nearly as big of a problem as some people say, as ultimately money is just a means of exchange with no inherent value of its own, so it it good to be able to adjust the supply easily to account for the real world demand. If you want to read more about that the so called Modern Monetary Theory is a good start.

I never claimed that increasing money supply was a problem, but that having private banks control most of the money supply is. Private banks have a tendency to be less then ethical organizations, which tends to cause massive economic crisis, once their unethical behaviour starts causing problems again. Happens way too often.

While it is true that taxation gives government issued fiat currencies its primary value, this is ultimately a coercive methode backed by the threat of violence and imprisionment, which is not something that I can support. It is also only one of many ways to structure a currency and have it being trusted by its users, so I think we will be able to figure out something better 😊

How do you fund public services, without collecting money from people?

First of all the reason you seem to get downvoted is the term altcoin, which is very much crypto currency, which has a lot of problems in a solarpunk context.

The fundamental problem currencies try to solve is a lack of trust between parties in a trade. Bascially if you get money, you know you can exchange it for something you want right now or later. So it enables transactions between people who do not know each other and do not trust each other, but trust a the third party issueing the currency. Hence a currency needs to be easy to transfer, so people actually use it, stable in value so people trust it, divisible so people can pay a fair price and recognized, so people can exchange it in as many places as possible for as many different types of goods or services as possible.

The way we usually solve it, is by having a government issue the currency. The reason it has value, is that people living in the country issueing the currency have to pay taxes in that currency. So a lot of people actually do need it. Obviously this require governments and gives those governments a lot of power. However there is another way and that is begging the currency to something, which has value. We do that all the time with coupons and vouchers. The problem with that is that the whatever it is being pegged too, can change in value relative to the entire economy. So if you have your currency fixed to say imaginum and there is only a fixed supply of imaginum in the world, but the economy grows twice in size, you end up with 100% inflation. That was a massive problem with the gold standard btw. It was somewhat fixed, by governments printing more money, then they could actually back with gold. Obviously that is not quite the idea.

So given the options a well run government system seems to me to be better. The good part about that, is that this allows to fund public services as well.

However most currency today is not created by governments today. Instead it is created by banks. When a bank gives you a loan, you get cash and the bank gets a gurantee from you worth the loan. You get cash from the bank and for that the bank gets a gurantee that you pay back the loan. The bank does not use its own money for it, but money other bank cutomers have in their bank accounts. Obviously though those cutomers can still pay with the money they have in their bank account using credit cards for example. So a loan basically doubles the money in the system.

So most money is debt and debt has a big problem in the solarpunk world, as it requires more money to be paid back. Hence you need economic growth and that is a really nasty problem. So making banking illegal would solve a lot of problems.

TLDR: Government issued currency, without banking.

WTF is going on with “innocent until proven guilty”. She just got charged and not convicted after all. Her former boss really should pay compensation for lost income.

At first the committee had intended to honour only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, but a committee member and advocate for women scientists, Swedish mathematician Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, alerted Pierre to the situation, and after his complaint, Marie’s name was added to the nomination. Marie Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

Wrong community. This one is for about the server. !solarpunk@slrpnk.net or !urbanism@slrpnk.net would be better.

No

The petition also needs to go over 1million signatures. So French and Germans signatures help as well.

The stupid part is that whaling is not even profitable.

Shoplifitng is a direct challenge to private property. That in itself is the bases of capitalism. Hence you would get cops guarding Walmart, if it became to common.

However it is also not a practise, which shows a workable alternative. At least shoplifting does not have a clear obvious way to distinguish between what you actually need and what you just want to have. Taking what you want, is just not workable with limited resources.

A good number of reddit subs related to politics used very very heavy moderation to keep bots out. Many required a certain number of karma, time on reddit or similar to post on in the first place… It did not alwawys work and can lead to bubbles. Obviously so can just insulting other users. I would give it a try with some controversial memes. Something like Biden and Trump are the same. That usually gets some really bad discussions.

Setting up a community to explain bans is not needed. The mods of a community are public, so it is easy to just message them.

Funny thing something like that happened to the account:

2.11 is very clear about abolishing all labor laws. 1.0 is very clear about "Individuals are inherently free to make choices for themselves and must accept responsibility for the consequences of the choices they make. " hence slave contracts are legal, as long as you do sell yourself for any reason. The rest is just pure and simple logic. States are one of the systems redistributing wealth, obviously not perfectly, but richer people are supposed to pay more taxes then the poor. The rest is distributed via social security, which the Libertarian Party is against as stated in 2.13 and 2.14. With contracts being enforced and no limits on contracts being placed, they replace many current laws. Hence you get an aristocratic class. Eve worse 3.7 expressly allows for governments to be completely ignored, if they hurt their freedoms.

I have no doubt that most libertarians are actually good people and mostly are pissed at a lot of stupid government rules, which are absolutely real. However it is like a lot of things an overreaction, which could hurt a lot of people.

You mean abolish all labor laws and enforce all contracts to the letter by the government. We know that this is going to lead to company towns, slave contracts and similar setups. We had those everywhere before the workers won those laws. You end up with a capitalist class ruling everything in a nearly aristrocatic fashion. This is already the case in many ways, but this would make it so much worse.

We have cooperatives in a lot of forms being part of our existing system. This is in the form of housing coops, cooperative banks, cooperative stores and worker owned companies. All of them survive and some even thrive in our current system. Mostly they are growing slowly, if at all, but are much more stable and fiscally conservative. They can even work very well on natural monopolies as utility cooperatives have shown.

There are also legal setups like trusts, which can be very benefitial, if done right.

Nope, they just put up their version of the billboard on some ad companies infrastructure. It is illegal, but does not carry a big punishment, and even so it is not enforced by the police. They even have a guide on how to do it:

http://brandalism.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Brandalism_Subvertising_Manual_web.pdf

Oil companies usually do not, but electricity companies do. The problem is that oil companies are great in geology, drilling and chemistry. Geothermal is a similar skill set and chemistry can be used in other products, but the first is small business and the other not renewable nexessarily.

Probably, but we most certainly can afford to have miniumum basic services using some form of UBI or mix it with some public housing and other forms of direct material support. There is also nothing wrong with actual work for the most part and we absolutly can provide benefits to people that are willing to take on some tasks. Right now most rich countries have unemployment benefits already, which cover a lot of that.

You could run something like a tool liberay with UAVs. That would be usefull and allow for a larger warehouse outside the city center.

However currently we have postal service and food deliveries as something similar to UAV services. Those do not cause much traffic. Most of that is people going from A to B without really transporting anything.