Regardless of what money is issued or printed by whom: why do we allow these decisions to be made on our behalf, in secret, by people who don't have our interests at heart and have no incentive to make good on their promises to do right by us?
That's the basic question at the heart of Marxism, I think. How have we been convinced that we should step aside and let others decide the course of the majority of our lives on our behalf, as if we don't know much better than they do how things should be run? Especially given the lack of overlap between the people who are most deeply affected by economic policies (workers who are dependent on wages and market forces to survive) and the people who devise and eventually enact economic policies(elected state officials who are usually far wealthier than the people they represent). We just accept this as the way things must be, and instead devote our energies to debating about deficits.
There is a strange dichotomy between the workplace and the public sphere. At work, we do not expect any democratic influence behind the major directives of the companies that employ us. We can chip in our two cents if asked, but in the end the choices are made by the owners and shareholders, who have this power because they have access to money, not because they work the hardest at whatever the company is supposed to do. In the public sphere, we demand at least a veneer of democracy, and at least in the USA, we are quick to regard what we have as the best system possible, worlds apart from the cruel dictatorships we sometimes go to war with. However, the same cruelty is never recognized in the context of where we spend the majority of our lives and expend the majority of our energies: at work.
The other aspect of this dichotomy is the difference between public and private concerns when it comes to planning. Within a business, rational strategy is an absolute necessity in order to be successful, and everything from the layout of the firm to the individual roles of its employees is expected to follow a plan set out in advance, with an eye to the future and contingencies for every risk. But between businesses, there can be no planning, only the anarchy of market competition and winner-takes-all posturing for dominance. Any suggestion that the activities of multiple companies should be coordinated together to meet shared goals, rather than pitted against one another at the mercy of unpredictable swings in the economy, is taken to be an affront to personal freedom. Yet, within a company, we are happy to participate in whatever plan has been handed down by the bosses, even though the plan is not a plan for how to make everybody's life better, it's a plan for how to make the bosses the most profit. We enthusiastically play our parts in these arrangements while simultaneously rejecting the notion that a social plan on the scale larger than an individual business, aimed at maximizing the well-being of all rather than the few who are in charge, is something worth doing.
I don't agree.
Planning is a poor way to get a good result in most circumstances, and can only be really effective at very small scales, where all the variables are known to the planner, and unexpected disruptions can be communicated back to that planner and the plan modified in real time to cope with changed circumstances.
Medium sized companies are at the very largest end of the scale where central planning can be made to work. Most large companies resolve this by structuring themselves into divisions that are largely independent, often by both function and geography. But that leads to the well known problem of siloed thinking, and the 'left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing', leading to the twin evils of inefficiency, and the bureaucracy that is intended to mitigate those inefficiencies.
The solution, in both cases, is to forget about trying to plan the activity at the low level, and to instead plan only the broad strategy. In place of planning, you introduce signalling systems that tell the different parts of the company what to do and when, based not on some master plan, but rather on the actual events. The Japanese pioneered the use of a system called 'kanban', in which each worker (or work unit) in a factory knows what to do next not because the boss says 'Now make a thousand widgets', but because when the next process on the line starts running short of widgets, they send a 'widget card' back up the line that says 'Make 1,000 widgets'.
In its simplest form, a kanban can be as simple as having two bins of parts. Both hold the same number of parts, and that number is equal to the maximum number of parts used in the time it takes to obtain another bin of that part. When a bin is empty, you send it to be re-filled. In principle, you should never run short of that part. The empty bin itself is the signal to make more.
More complicated systems are needed as the complexity of the process being controlled increases; Tickets that indicate the priority of different tasks get passed around - if a green ticket comes in at the same time as a red one, you act on the red one first. The rules are kept as simple as possible; The actual activity being prompted by these rules is highly complex, and far more efficient than a central planner could have achieved.
When you get to a really high level of complexity, you can set priorities as numbers - the highest numbers get dealt with first, and lower numbers get dealt with last (if at all). The number you put on tickets you issue is constrained, so each individual workstation must decide how badly they need supplies, and number their kanbans accordingly.
The ultimate kanban is called a 'dollar'. You get them from the people and organizations that you supply stuff to, and can use them to get stuff from your suppliers. Each individual is responsible for setting their own priorities, and deciding how many dollars to offer to a suppler in exchange for a given good or service. These signals automatically prioritize the production of those things which are in greatest demand - there is no shadowy 'planner' imposing his will on the system; Just strategic re-prioritization of certain goals, by removing dollars from parts of the system that have too many, and injecting dollars into parts of the system where they are too scarce.
We call this 'taxation' and 'spending', but it's actually just adjusting priorities. People get all steamed up about having some of 'their' dollars taken away in taxes, and given to someone else as welfare - but actually, the dollars all belong to the people running the system, and they can and should redistribute them to achieve the strategic direction that they were elected to pursue.
We observe that, in the absence of this strategic rebalancing, dollars tend to accumulate in fewer and fewer parts of the system, simply because having dollars makes getting more dollars easier. However some people sincerely believe that this is an acceptable or even desirable situation. Others sincerely think that having equal numbers of dollars in each person's hands is a good thing - having failed to realize that this describes a static (ie not working at all) economy. The reality is that we must have a middle ground to achieve maximum efficiency in getting resources from where they are, to where they are needed. And we have been successfully employing that strategy since the end of commodity money - with some wide variations due to the foolish pursuit of one or other of the extreme ideologies, or more commonly due to a lack of understanding of these fundamental facts about what the economy IS - it's a signalling system that is supposed to tell everyone what the best use of their time and effort is right now, in order to implement the wider strategy of society as determined by our leaders. In a representative democracy, that strategy should, in principle, largely reflect the aggregate view of the people.
Central planning not only does not work on a large scale - there are sound reasons to expect that it cannot work - like weather forecasting, the ability to make long range predictions requires a level of accuracy in the inputs and an amount of processing power that is physically impossible to achieve over longer planning horizons. Tomorrow's weather forecast is likely to be right. A forecast four days ahead is better than guessing. A forecast a month ahead is not better than guessing.
Money is a signal. That's ALL money is. It's not property - it's worth nothing until you spend it. our wealth is a tally of how much we have put into society, above and beyond what we have taken out in goods and services. To the extent that we feel that individuals have unfairly high or unfairly low tallies, we can (and should) take away and destroy the excess money held by the rich (ie tax them); And create money and distribute it to the poor (ie pay them welfare). These two activities are not, and need not be, linked at the strategic level.
