Utopia Governance & the Commons by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

Chapter 8 also suggests splitting up the banks so there is no longer a problem of financial institutions that are ‘too big to fail’. Bringing money back closer to its links with goods and services means that the false economy of financial speculation — derivatives, hedge funds and the like — can be dismantled. Making banking more local and personal will mean that local businesses will benefit most. Returning banking to being a service will benefit everyone and not just the few. Taxing the dividends received from shares is another possibility. Another idea in Chapter 8 is money that is de-valued over time, so could, for instance, require some kind of stamp attached to it in order to bring it back up to its nominal value. Chapter 8 also suggested a minimum duration for the ownership of shares so that shares could go back to being genuinely about supporting business rather than a casino lottery on the variations in share prices and currencies. A further idea in Chapter 8 is to stop creating money by borrowing it into existence. The

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Utopia Governance and the Commons

private loan, for instance, is often for the purchase of land and property — it is not a loan against the future increase in production, as the borrowing of money was once understood to be about. Borrowing, as it occurs today, tends to increase the value of land and property and adds to disparities in wealth. Instead governments could create wealth by investing in large infrastructure projects for the public good — a concept known as ‘sovereign money’. In answering the question of what we own, the commons and Parapolity suggest that we are all owners. We need to spread that wealth rather than allow it to be appropriated by just a few.

In Chapter 8, and elsewhere, we also looked at alternative business structures such as businesses run as co-operatives. I hope that the message got through there that owning is less important than what we do with what we have and how we share with others. Businesses have a responsibility in their use of the natural commons, their relationship to wild nature, to their local communities and to their employees. Co-operatives that share their profits seem like an obvious step as part of meeting these responsibilities.