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Solution page 5:
The Inflation-proofed Value Unit

When the people of the world have a common monetary language,
completely freed from every government,
it will so facilitate and stabilize exchange
that peace and prosperity will ensue even without world government.
A union of peoples rather than a union of political governments is what this world needs.

~ E. C. Riegel, monetary theorist, The New Approach to Freedom 1949

Those who have seen Money as Debt III - Evolution Beyond Money will see that the proposal for establishing a value unit presented below, differs significantly from the one shown in the movie and at the Digital Coin website. In Money as Debt III, I proposed a value unit that would be smoothly predictable by basing it on a weighted basket of national currencies, as many others, including the International Monetary Fund, do currently.

My original proposal was to create this new unit by selling tradable "Perpetual Coins" for national currencies giving a Perpetual Coin a reliable redemption value in national currency, and, within the system, a different trading value defined according to a formula derived from national currencies, designed to be both a smooth curve and resist the general devaluation of fiat currencies.

The important point to avoid getting confused about, is that Perpetual Coin was never to be like gold, a "single uniform commodity in limited supply". Nor was it ever supposed to be a "reserve" of any sort. It was just an attempt to create a new unit for "value", when the only value units people currently comprehend are their own national currencies (and in many places the US dollar).

Ultimately the new Value Unit could be a simple formula that ensures that you always get back the same real purchasing power you put in, no more, no less. Therefore, I have come to the conclusion that money needs to be defined in terms of the things we need to buy with it and that this can be accomplished quite simply. While the list of necessities differs from culture to culture, place to place, and individual to individual, we can define, in the abstract, the quantity of everything we need or want to buy as Q. Therefore, whenever we make a purchase we compare the value to us of that particular purchase compared to the value of Q, which is all of the other choices for which we might need or want to exchange that amount of value.

This leads to this current proposal which is that Producer Credits be valued according to the US Dollar value of a fixed basket of globally significant commodities which represent Q.

commodities

If this system were to be adopted, the composition of this basket would be forever a core topic of politics and economics. The one thing it can never contain is labor because real price increase is when prices of goods rise relative to the price of labor.

However, at this time, and with no resources to create such an index, it is proposed to use the Rogers International Commodity Index, (RICI), which has a good reputation and its founder and namesake, Jim Rogers, is a wise man. The RICI basket tracks "futures contracts on 37 different exchange-traded physical commodities, quoted in five different currencies, listed on thirteen exchanges in six countries".

The RICI in detail (pdf)

TRogersindexlogo

The adoption of a common value unit by mutual agreement could be done right now by existing alternative systems of all kinds, even Bitcoin. It is simply a mathematical, logical and equitable route out of unstable national currency units and into a stable "common monetary language" as called for in the opening E.C. Riegel quotation. Monetary inflation/deflation of national currencies is filtered out by defining the value unit as the current national currency value of a fixed amount of real goods (Q). Defined this way, any form of money or credit can be made "inflation-proofed" while remaining translatable into any national currency via the foreign exchange market.

back / next ~ Does this method of valuation create any distortion?

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