SK
Posted by Maybe a bit ambitious title at first sight. But if you read to the end, I promise you’ll be thinking about whether I’m right or wrong about the topic.
What problems?
- The problems in every person’s microworld:
Things and emotions such as envy, disbelief, laziness, to curiosity. Injustice that arises from the illegitimate redistribution of the generated values. Drug and property crime, gambling, unpaid alimony, political corruption and recoverability of stolen property. I discuss the depth of change at the micro level of every single person in detail in this writeup.
2. The problems of the macroworld as a whole: corruption at the level of dictators, dictatorial regime in Russia sitting on the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, the nascent dictatorship supported by IT in China. We can boost economic growth by tens of percent. Problems with climate change and uncontrollable technological development in capitalism. All war conflicts waged for greed, extremism, refugee crises. I discuss these in depth in this article.
3. Other problems that bother every person – improving health care, elimination of disease, perhaps even achieving immortality. For more information about the ultimate healthcare project, click here.
How to eliminate?
I read Conversations with God 2, a book by the American author Neale Donald Walsch, in the second half of the 1990s. Walsch writes that in truly developed societies – those where no one wants anything at the expense of others – money is fully visible and transparent. I have been pondering about this tenet for the next 30 years. When I read the book for the first time and then compared the society described in the book with what was happening in Mečiar’s Slovakia in the fight for privatized property, I realized how far off base we were.
So what does it mean?
If money were fully transparent and visible, i.e. if a freely available information system existed – something like Facebook – for financial information where everyone could see the assets and financial flows of anyone else in society, this change would be detrimental to the development of humanity, and it is definitely worth fighting for. At first sight, such a change inevitably provokes resistance in a person who has lived in a world where money is private. No one needs his curious neighbors prying into his wallet even if he has the same right. However, I think that this mindset is just a matter of habit. When a European first comes to North America, he feels uneasy about the wide streets and big cars. He’s not feeling at home there. However, when he gets used to it after a few months, he recognizes the practicality of this solution. If he settles there permanently, his children will no longer wonder whether the streets really need to be that wide. There is also a practical reason for this. The same with visible money. The second generation will already take the transparency of money for granted and with a lot of benefits. In addition, the system will not be implemented in society from day to day. It will be used by the people who have nothing to hide and want to move society forward with their transparency. Just as organic food has become commonplace alongside normal food, visible money will coexist with standard money. Gradually, as the number of pioneers grows, full transparency will become a necessary requirement, for example for the exercise of a political function.
Most frequent points of criticism
Critical voices can be heard especially from the right-liberal part of society (I count myself a member) that the system would, as always, be circumvented by the wealthiest and normal people would just lose privacy. However, one crucial point must be emphasized here. Namely, that the information would be open to every single member of society. If a person declares that the list of his/her property is posted on the Internet for all to see, but somebody sees him on a new yacht in the middle of nowhere with not enough earnings to afford it, the whole world will know. By making the information available to anyone who’s interested, things that are currently hidden would come to the surface. Such full transparency is a silver bullet for 90% of the world’s problems. Transferring property to family members might initially be a solution to bypass the system, but a very short-sighted one. Those who abuse the system would forever appear on the wall of shame – of course, if not for GDPR. But I think the Internet would take care of alternative lists. Having a good reputation would be more valuable than money.
So what would change?
First of all, we would have a lot more knowledge. About everything. About how the world actually goes by, who has ties to whom and how, and why people behave the way they do. Almost every interpersonal relationship can be traced through finance. Thanks to the database of financial information, all this information would be readily accessible.
Suddenly, you would see that your boss is lying when he claims that the increase in your salary is not economically viable. You would see that your less skilled college classmate has twice the salary at XY. There would be nothing to prevent you from trying an interview with them. Sure, the information revealed in this manner might be undesirable for some, but the fact that such information is be available would give these people a weapon to deal with the new situation much more effectively. The economy would flourish in this environment – the weak points of value creation would suddenly be visible and they would be optimized quickly.
Disadvantages of visible money
I don’t want to limit myself to praising the system – here’s a link in which its disadvantages are addressed.
Conclusion
I am fully aware that this potential change will be extremely difficult to implement and that any discussion in this direction requires a strong out-of-the-box thinking. However, this won’t discourage me from searching for the right recipe for the people to live together.
The lack of transparency of private money is simply not right because it is the source of an enormous number of problems. How we make and spend money is not a private matter because it fundamentally affects the environment we all live in.
If you find the idea of visible money appealing, please register on the project website and subscribe to our newsletter. This builds the initial community around the project. You will learn more – for example, how it could be realistically implemented.
Thank you,
Peter Boško
Project author
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