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To continue with Lindy Davies’s presentation on the thought of Karl Polanyi (July 30, 2017), Lindy said that money is a medium of exchange. Polanyi was down on the gold standard because debtor countries couldn’t devalue. We don’t have that anymore, we have fiat currency, but there are still problems.
Do banks have a monopoly on money creation? It’s disputed; competition exists. Without bailouts, banking would be more competitive. The problem is that the largest source of collateral is real estate, which is inherently volatile. The eighteen year real estate cycle leads to periodic banking crises.
Land, the gift of the Creator, is treated as if it were a commodity. The pipeline protestors said that the pipeline profaned sacred sites. Lindy believes in spiritual, sacred places, but he quoted Chief Seattle’s speech — the real one, not the phony one sometimes attributed to him, and said that the whole North American continent was the grave of Seattle’s tribes fathers and friends. Sacred land is not special places, but all land.
Consider this in a hard-nosed economic way. We have seen sprawl, and blight in St. Louis and East St. Louis. There is suburban sprawl,around this blighted urban center. This is not just an urban/suburban problem; corn is being grown for ethanol, which is blasphemy.
The market is our friend, and land monopoly is our enemy.
Lindy spoke of global resources. Global problems like warming and ocean acidification. We need markets to address these problems.
To be followed by a summary of the Q&A session.
Do banks have a monopoly on money creation? It’s disputed; competition exists. Without bailouts, banking would be more competitive. The problem is that the largest source of collateral is real estate, which is inherently volatile. The eighteen year real estate cycle leads to periodic banking crises.
Land, the gift of the Creator, is treated as if it were a commodity. The pipeline protestors said that the pipeline profaned sacred sites. Lindy believes in spiritual, sacred places, but he quoted Chief Seattle’s speech — the real one, not the phony one sometimes attributed to him, and said that the whole North American continent was the grave of Seattle’s tribes fathers and friends. Sacred land is not special places, but all land.
Consider this in a hard-nosed economic way. We have seen sprawl, and blight in St. Louis and East St. Louis. There is suburban sprawl,around this blighted urban center. This is not just an urban/suburban problem; corn is being grown for ethanol, which is blasphemy.
The market is our friend, and land monopoly is our enemy.
Lindy spoke of global resources. Global problems like warming and ocean acidification. We need markets to address these problems.
To be followed by a summary of the Q&A session.
