James Robertson on the attention-arresting concept of ...

James writes in his latest newsletter:

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?Collectively the leaders of this country seem not just traumatised, to quote Item 2 (4) below, but deranged.

?Why on earth are they and other countries? leaders allowing the professional money experts to continue wasting the world?s public money and other scarce resources in order to maintain the privilege of commercial banks to create the public money supply as profitable debt for themselves? How much longer do they expect the world?s people to endure increasingly severe ?austerity? measures, to achieve an objective becoming more and more widely recognised as unnecessary and unacceptable?

?Against that background, much of this newsletter explores the urgent need for a simple policy framework to ensure the survival of human civilisation in the 21st century.

?Two linked concepts provide the basis for it. The first is ?The Commons? (interpreted today as the money value of Common Resources); the other is ?Predistribution, not Redistribution? of money values.

?Those concepts figure between pages 128 and 140 of my recent book Future Money ? www.jamesrobertson.com/futuremoney.htm ? see the offer of free access to a pdf copy). In this context, those pages refer to the money values of ?The Commons? and how we should treat them. But I will say a bit more here about the meaning of ?Predistribution?.

?An early reference to it as a preferable alternative government policy to ?redistribution? was in my Alternative Mansion House Speech of 15 June 2000 on Financial and Monetary Policies for an Enabling State ? www.jamesrobertson.com/ne/alternativemansionhousespeech-2000.pdf.

?The relevant passage on page 13 of the speech was as follows:

?Sharing the value of common resources should be seen as predistribution. * Whereas redistribution aims to correct the outcomes of economic activity after the event, predistribution shares the value of essential inputs to economic activity. Whereas redistribution is dependency-reinforcing, predistribution is enabling. Because it addresses the underlying causes of economic injustice, inequality and exclusion, predistribution is an essential feature of a prosperous economy in an inclusive society. It reverses the private ?enclosure? of common resources on which so much conventional economic development has been based ? and still is.?

* I owe this thought to Joseph Huber, co-author of ?Creating New Money?.

?(For interested readers, a search for ?predistribution? on my website will give you a few more references to it ? www.jamesrobertson.com/search.htm.)?

Posted in James Robertson | Tagged Alternative Mansion House Speech, Common Resources, Joseph Huber, Predistribution, Redistribution | Leave a Comment

Source: http://neweranetwork.info/2013/03/13/james-robertson-on-the-attention-arresting-concept-of-predistribution/

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