Heteconomist’s critique of Positive Money’s proposals
“The real question to me is not whether private banks should be allowed to create money through the lending process, but whether – and to what extent – there should be private banking at all. Nationalized banking, at least the nationalization of big banking, should be considered, in my opinion.”
A few days ago, we published a podcast-interview with Ben Dyson, of Positive Money. After sharing it on Facebook, Dmytri Kleiner suggested the following article, written by Peter Cooper and originally published in heteconomist.com, which criticises some of Positive Money’s proposals. Aside from his suggestion to stop playing nice with private banking altogether (which I agree with), Cooper states, “The biggest problem is the notion of an undemocratic, independent committee determining the government’s capacity to create new money”. Conversely, Positive Money argues that “… the MCC (Monetary Creation Committee) is a democratically accountable transparent public body with the remit to work in the public interest.”
Now, to me, “democratically accountable” isn’t the same thing as democratically elected, even if it arguably is, by proxy. Nor do I think that representative democracy is all that democratic, but I understand Positive Money’s choice to keep their narrative within mainstream ideology, even if a lot of it is quite subversive. They’re certainly doing a good job of opening Pandora’s box in exposing money creation, and it’s my hope that this will serve as a gateway drug to the work of Silvio Gesell or Charles Eisenstein, among others.
As an added bonus, and getting back to Kleiner, here are his reasons for not wallpapering a mainstream façade over what, in the end, are revolutionary notions.
