Chapter 12, How to Solve the Money Problem
The political money system is the keystone in the arch of power. — Thomas H. Greco, Jr.
Having laid the necessary foundation in the first eleven chapters, we can now proceed to summarize the requirements for solving the money problem. We have shown how money has been politicized and how the control over its creation and allocation has become, what I call, “the keystone in the arch of power,” a power which is at once financial, economic, political, and social. Those who control money are able to control everything else. The inherent dysfunctions of the present monetary regime derive mainly from the following structural elements:
· The monopolization of credit by the banking cartel in collusion with national governments
· The creation of money by banks as interest-bearing “loans”
· Legal tender status for official debt-money
· The elimination of any operational concrete measure of value and unit of account
We have seen how that system:
· Enables national governments to finance endless wars and other projects that are wasteful, destructive, and contrary both to the wishes of the citizenry and to the common welfare
· Enables banks to reap inordinate profits while deciding to whom and for what purpose the money shall be distributed among “borrowers”
· Gives a small, elite “super-class” the non-bona-fide money to acquire an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s real wealth and the ability to control political and economic affairs worldwide
· Forces the exponential growth of debt, and destructive competition for an always-insufficient supply of money for all debts to be repaid
Reform or Transcendence?
Among those who have recognized that our money system is problematic, there are on the one hand those who seek to reform money and banking through political means, and on the other those who seek to transcend it by private initiative and the creative application of innovative methods and technologies. These two approaches are quite at odds with one another, because the reform approach accepts as given the sociopolitical foundations of the present monetary regime and adheres to the erroneous belief that money should be, if not the exclusive province of government, at least primarily controlled by government.
Reformers, including the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), have proposed new legislation that would take the money power away from international bankers who control the central banks, and give it to national governments to exercise directly. They have failed to recognize that national governments are already complicit with the banking cartel in the creation and allocation of fiat money, much of it non-bona-fide, and that the system works to the advantage of both. Advocates of MMT have even managed to succeed in getting a few politicians to sponsor bills calling for the government to spend money directly into circulation, as President Lincoln did by issuing a currency that became known as the “greenbacks” during the Civil War. But that approach unwittingly perpetuates the money problem because it fails to recognize the insidious and undemocratic nature of elite power, and that the fundamental problem with the present political money system is the monopolization of credit (money) per se, and not who happens to control the monopoly.
Benn Steil, the Director of International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, has acknowledged that governments cannot be trusted with the money power and will not act to remedy the situation, saying, “In the nineteenth century, governments spent less than ten percent of national income in a given year. Today, they routinely spend half or more, and so they would never subordinate spending to the stringent requirements of sustaining a commodity-based monetary system”[1] [emphasis added]. By commodity-based monetary system, he means one in which the value of the currency is measured in relation to gold or some other commodity. His statement makes it clear that there will be no end to deficit spending and no end to inflation. Yet he advises governments of less-developed countries to surrender their money creation power and adopt the dollar, or euro, or a proposed pan-Asian currency — a move that would take them from the frying pan into the fire.
Given the fact that national politics has come so completely under the control of the elite globalist interests and given the collusive arrangement that has aligned the political interests with the global financial interests, the political approach to reform is a dead end. But reformers may have done some good at least by educating the public about some aspects of the money problem and making it once again a political issue. Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign was worthwhile on that basis alone, but what we really need for government to do is not to take control of the money monopoly, but to end it.
Economist Richard Timberlake has also argued that, “Until the government’s monopoly over money is abolished, good private competitive enterprise money will never have the chance to drive out bad governmental monopoly money,”[2] while noting that, “The private production of money in the United States has appeared at numerous times and under diverse circumstances when state-supplied moneys proved exceptionally inadequate. Scrip, token, and ledger credit moneys were prominent in the U.S. in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in spite of proscriptive federal laws.”[3]
My hope is that “reformers” and “transformers” will eventually join together in their pursuit of a common objective of creating a system of exchange that is more honest, equitable, and sustainable. Buckminster Fuller has argued that, “All who are really dedicated to the earliest possible attainment of economic and physical success for all humanity — and thereby realistically to eliminate war — will have to shift their efforts from the political arena to participate in the design revolution.”[4]
I fully agree with E. C. Riegel that an essential element of the “design revolution” is education, and that,
“The greatest enemy of mankind is ignorance of the inherent money power in all of us. When the realization of this comes to man he will, like Sampson, push down the walls of his prison. Finance, which is the creature of the unholy wedlock between banker and state cannot be solved by either partner dominating or consuming the other. The only solution lies in the people denying the power of both over industry, and their assertion of their own money power.”[5]
Thus, we have, in Chapter 8, called for the separation of money and state, but since the people do not control their government, we believe that separation can only be achieved as the people assert their money power from the bottom upward, community by community, state by state, and region by region, until we have built “a worldwide web of exchange” that is locally controlled yet globally useful.
Emerging Exchange Alternatives
The most graceful and promising approach to empowering ourselves and our communities is through voluntary, entrepreneurial activities that can liberate the exchange process and reclaim “the credit commons.” So long as people have the freedom of association and the right to contract it will be difficult if not impossible for governments to prevent the creation of exchange media and mechanisms by private initiative. We can thereby, step-by-step, reduce our dependence upon bank borrowing and political currencies, taking control of our own credit and organizing independent means for allocating it directly to those individuals and businesses that we trust and wish to support. Riegel reminds us that, “there is no constitutional or statutory barrier to the inauguration of a private enterprise, non-debt, non-interest, mutual money system.”[6] Only popular control of credit and competition in currencies can transcend the money problem. As Ulrich von Beckerath has observed, “Extension of exchange transactions without State money is in reality the beginning of a new system of settling accounts, indeed the beginning of a new economic order.”[7] A new economic order is precisely what is needed at this point in history.
While in the past, credit was more decentralized and private currencies were not uncommon, the current re-emergence of independent credit-based exchange alternatives is still in its early stages of development. It may be compared perhaps to the state of development of aviation in the early twentieth century. In drawing that analogy, we might ask: why were the Wright brothers successful in achieving manned powered flight when so many others had failed? It seems clear to me that it is because their approach was both persistent and systematic. They learned all they could about the principles of flight by reading what others had already learned, by making careful observation of the phenomenon of flight in nature, and by conducting well-designed experiments. Clayton Christensen makes a similar observation with regard to innovation in general, saying that,
“…the ancients who attempted to fly by strapping feathered wings to their arms and flapping with all their might as they leapt from high places invariably failed. Despite their dreams and hard work, they were fighting against some very powerful forces of nature. No one could be strong enough to win this fight. Flight became possible only after people came to understand the relevant natural laws and principles that defined how the world worked: the law of gravity, Bernoulli’s principle, and the concepts of lift, drag, and resistance. When people then designed flying systems that recognized or harnessed the power of these laws and principles rather than fighting them, they were finally able to fly to heights and distances that were previously unimaginable.”[8]
The same applies to innovation in exchange systems. In order to optimize exchange system designs and develop effective implementation strategies, it is necessary to study the history of money and to understand the theory of money; to observe social dynamics, markets, and networks; to examine the systems that already exist; and to design our experiments to be unambiguous in their answers. What has and has not worked in the past? Who has proposed promising solutions that have not yet been adequately tested or demonstrated? How, where, and under what circumstances can those proposed solutions be adapted to today’s conditions? What are the factors that favor such innovations, and what are the political factions and market elements that are likely to oppose them?
In supporting the “freedom approaches” advocated by Riegel, I have considered what can be done by private, voluntary initiative — by associations of businesses, by grassroots organizations, by nonprofits and NGOs, and even by municipal and provincial governments. Thanks to some brilliant thinkers who have preceded us, we now have an adequate understanding of the principles needed to design exchange mechanisms that are sound, effective, and economical — but more importantly that are honest, fair, and empowering. And thanks to the newer computerized telecommunications technologies, we now have the tools and the infrastructure necessary to easily implement these designs.
When I tell people that my work involves the design and implementation of systems for trading without the use of money, they almost invariably respond with, “Oh, barter.” That evidently is because barter is the only exchange alternative they have ever heard of. I then have to explain that, no, barter is not what I’m talking about, that barter is very inefficient and limited in its possible scope, and that there are indeed other possibilities — like nongovernmental currencies and credit clearing exchanges. In Chapters 9, 10, and 11, we described in some detail how the reciprocal exchange process has evolved from simple barter to different kinds of money — commodity money, symbolic money, and credit money. And while all of these forms are called “money,” they each have distinctly different characteristics — and now, with direct credit clearing, we have the potential to create effective exchange systems that completely transcend money as we’ve known it.
The keys to transcending the monetary confusion — and liberating the exchange process — lie in accomplishing the following:
1. the separation of the various functions that money is supposed to serve,
2. the democratization and decentralization of the exchange process, and,
3. the definition and use of an objective, concrete, standard unit of account.
Separating the Functions of Money
Anyone who has ever taken a course in economics has learned that money is basically three things: (1) a medium of exchange, (2) a store of value, and (3) a measure of value. But as I have pointed out before, those are three functions; they do not describe the essence of money. The essence of modern money is credit. While commodity money can appear to serve all three functions, credit money cannot and should not. These three functions are mutually contradictory. If money is a medium of exchange, it needs to be spent, but if it is a store of value, it should be held. And if money is a credit instrument, there needs to be some way of quantifying credit; how much value does the credit instrument promise? That is why currencies were previously defined as a particular weight of silver or gold. A currency should not itself be the measure of value; it must be denominated in terms of something real. What we need is to segregate these three functions in order to optimize and restore honest dealing to the reciprocal exchange process.[9]
Having studied monetary history and theory with a distinct bias toward promoting social justice, economic equity, and personal freedom, I believe that there is nothing more practical than a good theory. Let us look at the subject afresh with the objective of defining a set of instruments and processes that will better achieve each function. In a highly developed, interdependent, and interactive society, the problem boils down to answering three fundamental questions.
1. What can best serve the purpose of mediating economic exchange, i.e., what can be used as a payment medium to settle accounts?
2. What is the best way to “store” value and provide financing for capital formation?
3. What is the best way to measure economic values, i.e., how shall we define a unit of account that can be used to specify contractual obligations and to price the items of value offered in commerce?
When commodities, like gold and silver coins, served as money, they could, and did, to a degree, accomplish all of the described functions. But we don’t use commodity monies anymore, and they were never adequate to the task of mediating the exchange of value. Credit money has always existed and has rightly become the substance of modern money. Credit money is two evolutionary steps beyond commodity money, as we described in Chapter 9. We have now learned enough about credit and the exchange process to invent more perfect forms of reciprocal exchange based on credit. The problem of economic exchange involves the first and the third of the above questions: how to make payments and how to measure the value of goods and services being exchanged. How to manage the savings or store of value function will be deferred to a later chapter.
Money should serve only to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. We will use the term “money” to mean only a medium of exchange or means of payment and use it interchangeably with the term “currency.” As such, money should be created as “turnover credit” that accompanies the delivery of goods and services to the market by producers. In that way, it provides the payment media needed for those goods and services to be bought from the market by consumers. We have already introduced that concept in previous chapters and shall say more about it later on. As it becomes more generally recognized that money is merely an information system, myriad competing payment media will emerge and the use of the catch-all term “money” will diminish in favor of more specific terms that better describe each monetary function. Equitable and efficient exchange mechanisms, free from political manipulation, will become the norm. These will include both private and public community currencies, business-to-business trade exchanges, and mutual credit clearing circles. Uniform measures of value will be adopted enabling these to interact and provide ever more efficient and convenient payment processes.
Back to Commodity Money?
The so-called gold standard of the past did manage to impose a measure of fiscal discipline upon government issuers of currencies, but the inevitable inclination of nation states toward hegemony and armed conflict made it impossible to sustain. That standard has been obliterated by legal tender laws imposed to accommodate the economic demands of centralized power. There is no chance that governments will again submit to the harness of an objective measure of value. If there is to be a monetary role for gold or silver or any other commodity, it will be in private exchange systems; however, as we have argued in Chapter 7, while precious metals might serve as an objective measure of value, they should not be relied upon to be the payment media because of their limited supply.
They might also serve as a store of value, since commodities in general can help to preserve wealth in times of inflation and financial chaos. Commodity monies are useful for impersonal exchange transactions. They also provide portability of wealth and can be useful when people are displaced by natural disasters, political strife, and war and become refugees. But under more normal conditions, economies require exchange media whose supply is flexible enough to grow or shrink in accordance with the volume of trade that is required.
Like most people, I have no significant amount of gold or silver. What I do have to offer to the market is goods and services. I presume that you and most everyone else are in a similar position with your own goods and services that you are ready to sell. In the end, we each pay for the things we buy with the things we sell. It should by now be clear to the reader that rather than bartering or swapping some particular commodity, it is more efficient to simply sell to one another on credit, and then spend our credits to requisition whatever we may want from others in the market. The supply of any chosen commodity is limited, and most of the gold and silver is closely held by the central governments, central banks, and asset funds that control the dominant system and they are able to manipulate the market prices of those commodities. But credits can be created as needed at little or no cost so that all desirable trades can take place. To be sure, credit money has been badly abused, the banking monopoly has perverted it into usury-debt-money. However, the answer is not to discard credit money, but to perfect it through the establishment of mutual credit clearing networks and independent private and community currencies. This will not only liberate the exchange process but also help to knit a new social fabric to replace that which has been eroded by over-centralization and our reliance on the dominant system.
The Unit of Account Versus the Unit of Currency
One thing that almost everyone seems to have difficulty with is distinguishing between units of measure, on the one hand, and the things being measured, on the other. Accordingly, one hears talk about the shortage of money being analogous to a “shortage of inches,” which is an obvious absurdity. Of course, there can never be a shortage of any units of measure, but there can be a shortage of the things being measured in those units. Thus, in building a house there is never any shortage of feet, pounds, meters, or kilograms, but there may be a shortage of lumber (which is measured in feet or meters) or nails (which are measured in pounds or kilograms).
Certainly, the shortage of official money is one of its most serious defects, but solving the money shortage requires a proper understanding of the concepts of money and exchange and the reasons that cause the shortage in the first place. In Chapter 8 we spoke about the need for separation of money and state and showed that this confusion between the units of measure of value and the number of monetary units of credit available for making payments derives from legal tender laws that give the word “dollar” two distinct meanings. People generally fail to make this distinction between the unit of account and the currency unit because in today’s world the political currency unit is the unit of account.
As we have stated repeatedly, every unit of currency is a credit obligation — an IOU of a particular issuer, be it a government, a bank, a merchandising corporation, or some other entity. It may manifest as paper bills, or bank balances (“deposits”) on a bank ledger, or as smart card balances. But regardless of the form a currency may take, its essential nature remains the same — it is a credit obligation, an IOU. It is a fundamental necessity to be able to evaluate every credit instrument in terms of something of real value.
The Measurement of Value
The various value standards that have been used or proposed can be classified as follows:
· A currency standard (an existing currency unit, like the U.S. dollar or U.K. pound sterling)
· A commodity standard (a specified weight of some commodity, like silver or gold)
· An energy standard (a specified amount of energy, such as a kilowatt hour of electricity)
· A labor standard (a statistical unit of labor productivity)
· An index standard (a composite group or “market basket” of basic commodities)
The “measure of value” or “unit of account” function has not historically been well served by any currency. Government-issued or bank-issued fiat currencies, the type that are almost universal today, are especially unreliable measures of value because they are undefined in terms of anything real and are subject to gross manipulation by governments and banks. Being undefined, the purchasing power of these IOUs is determined by the monetary policies of the issuers rather than by actual productivity relationships or supplies of goods. The politicization of money has inhibited the widespread adoption of better alternatives. While political currencies might appropriately be used in the settlement of accounts, they need not and should not be used in defining the value of goods and services to be exchanged.
Let us briefly consider the most promising other possibilities. Dr. Walter Zander proposed “the introduction of unambiguously determined gold units of account as a monetary basis.” Failing government action in this direction, he pointed out a way in which private merchants and businesses have successfully protected themselves from official monetary malfeasance and consequent general price increases, saying:
“Even if, however, no State were for the moment ready to proceed along this line, there remains the possibility of finding a way out of the monetary chaos through private initiative or at least to prepare the way for this. When in the eighteenth century the national monetary units, because of alleged State needs, continually fluctuated and when it was therefore impossible to rely on the value of currencies for a measurable time even, Hamburg merchants, more particularly, discovered a way out. By founding the famous Hamburger Girobank, they, following the centuries’ old Chinese Tael system, made themselves independent of the debased State coinage by adopting as the basis of all their accounts an unminted definite weight of silver in the place of State money. This weight, called Mark Banko, constituted an unchangeable unit of calculation, which came to be of the greatest service economically for the whole of Northern Europe.[10] [emphasis added]
That unit did not require the minting of any coins or that payments be made in silver. The Mark Banco was merely a way to measure the value of things exchanged. Payment could still be rendered in any agreeable currency or through credit clearing. Such a silver unit of valuation could easily be utilized again. Free people can voluntarily choose to use their own accounting unit in dealings among themselves. A particular weight of silver or gold would be better than an undefined, manipulated currency unit, like the dollar or the euro. In times past, each bank issued its own currency notes independently. These notes, denominated in dollar units, promised redemption in silver dollars — thus they were accepted as payment for various goods and services to the extent of the value of the silver promised. When an issuing bank was not known to the seller of goods, or he had doubts about the bank’s solvency, its notes could be refused or discounted (accepted at less than face value). When paper notes of the government or central bank, denominated in dollars, were forced to circulate at par, that commodity standard was obliterated.
As I said at the Gold Dinar Conference in Malaysia in July 2007, precious metals might serve as workable interim standards,[11] but my preference, inspired by the Constant currency work of Ralph Borsodi, is for an Index standard, i.e., a unit that is defined not in terms of any single commodity, but in terms of an assortment of basic commodities. I’ve described in my previous books how to define such a standard, and how to derive a unit of account from it and have published that as an excerpt online.[12] Such a unit would be preferable because the value of a single commodity is subject to all the forces that determine its supply and demand in the market. A unit that is defined on the basis of a “market basket” of commodities will tend to be more stable over time because the price fluctuations of the various commodities tend to average each other out. I am not alone in advocating this sort of standard; according to Richard Timberlake, well-known economists Robert Greenfield and Leland Yeager have proposed that “Congress specify the unit-of-account dollar to consist of a bundle of staple, conventional, commonly marketed commodities.”[13]
When the global financial crisis reaches the acute stage, as it eventually must, there is no doubt that the international banking establishment will come forward with their own “solution,” but you can be sure that it will be another step in the wrong direction toward further centralization of control over credit and further disempowerment of the people. Benn Steil and the Council on Foreign Relations are already making the pitch for greater centralization. Steil argues that countries wanting to develop their economies have no alternative but to utilize the international financial system, calling for them to give up “monetary nationalism” and “replace [their] national currencies with the dollar or the euro or, in the case of Asia, collaborate to produce a new multinational currency over a comparably large and economically diversified area.”[14] The justification for such a proposal is that national governments have abused the issuance of their currencies. That is indisputable, but abuse has been universal, and ironically the elite groups that manage the dollar, the euro, and other leading world currencies, have become the greatest abusers. They now seek to enlarge the flock of sheep that they can shear.
A common unit of measure of value would be of great benefit to the world, but that can be accomplished without using a common currency or trusting a self-appointed financial elite to manage their currencies in the public interest. Remember, the dollar currency is a credit obligation of the Federal Reserve that is backed up by the US government which can change the rules of redemption at any time its wishes, as it did in 1971 by abrogating dollar convertibility to gold. The euro currency is a credit obligation of the European central bank and the countries that have adopted it, while the British pound is a credit obligation of the Bank of England backed up by the British government. These are all “third-party credit instruments.” If the seller of goods is the “first party” and the buyer is the “second party,” then the payment media they have traditionally used have been the IOUs of some “third party,” namely a central bank or government.
But private and community currencies can provide alternative “third party” credit instruments that may be used as payment media. These can help empower local communities and associations of “prosumers,”[15] but the best solution, in my opinion, will be to use no third-party credit instrument at all but to adopt the systems of direct credit clearing, the “UnMoney” which we described in Chapter 11.
To repeat, using a silver or gold unit of account does not mean that payments must be made in silver or gold, or that paper notes or ledger credits should be redeemable for silver or gold. Neither would a “market basket” unit need to be backed up by holding the commodities for redemption. Rather, if a dollar is defined as so much silver, and I owe you one hundred dollars, that does not necessarily mean that you can demand payment in silver. It just means that I owe you one hundred dollars’ worth of something, and that worth is determined by the current value of silver in the market. We need not revert to commodity money or symbolic (redeemable) money as a means of payment in order to have an honest money system. Credit money can be perfectly sound if properly issued on the basis of an adequate value foundation, like goods already in the shops or on their way and soon to arrive. But since credit money is an IOU, the market must be free to refuse it or discount it. Only the issuer should be compelled to accept their own currency at face value (par) because that is his promise, and his alone. Again, goods and services pay for other goods and services. We just need an honest measure, and the freedom to judge for ourselves the value of not only goods and services, but also the value of a currency or anything else we might use as a medium of exchange.
Confusion Caused by Legal Tender Laws
We’ve described how legal tender laws have obliterated objective definitions of the monetary units by making it illegal to discount inferior official currencies from their face value, so that now the dollar (and every other political currency) has two meanings — first as a means of payment or medium of exchange, and also as a measure of value or unit of account. Walter Zander described this disastrous confusion as follows:
“Whatever the monetary system of a country, it is essential that the measure of value should be clearly and unequivocally determined. Thus, where there is a gold currency, a silver currency, or an index currency, the value should be measured by gold, silver and the index respectively. This basis of measuring economic values, and therefore of any monetary system, is destroyed when in the case of gold or silver currency the notes of the bank of issue are made legal tender, for this compels everybody to accept these notes in payment regardless of their real value. Compulsory acceptance renders it even impossible to measure the notes by the unit of value within the country. Indeed, it establishes a legal fiction on the basis of which note, and unit of value are identical. For this reason, the names of the units of value — e.g., the terms dollar, mark, pound — become ambiguous in that they mean now a fixed weight of gold, and then the note of a bank of issue. Accordingly, the measure of value, on the unambiguity of which everything depends, comes to have two definitions. This renders impossible any real measurement and thus the whole monetary system is falsified.[16] [emphasis added]
The concrete definition of the monetary unit acted as a brake to limit the abuses by banks and governments in their issuing of paper currency notes or creating deposits. As already described in Chapter 7, the motivation that underlies every legal tender law is the wish of governments and their central bank cohorts to escape the consequences of their improper issuance and irresponsible financial manipulations. Legal tender should obligate only the governments and banks that issue national currencies to accept them back as payment at face value as payment of taxes or any other payments that are due to them. Private parties should be free to discount or refuse payment in those currencies.
Over the past century, the monetary units in the United States and throughout the world have been transformed from ones defined in real terms (gold or silver) to ones that are abstract and undefined. A shift has been made from an objective commodity standard to a currency standard, and this has occurred without any proper ethical, legal, or Constitutional foundation. But, as we’ve described, private initiative can solve the money problem and lead the way toward a new and peaceful, convivial civilization.
[1] Benn Steil, The End of National Currency. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/end-national-currency. Accessed July 3, 2024.
[2] Richard H. Timberlake, Monetary Policy in the United States. University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 420.
[3] Ibid. p. 411
[4] R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, p. 237.
[5] From Riegel’s essay Breaking the English Tradition. Available at https://beyondmoney.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/breakingenglishtradition-2.pdf. Accessed August 6, 2024.
[6] Ibid.
[7] The Practical Realization of the Milhaud Proposals. https://reinventingmoney.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/milhaud_proposals.pdf. Accessed July 23, 2024.
[8] Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, pp. xxvii–xix.
[9] I am not alone in arguing this point. Several others, both historically and currently, have so argued. See, for example, The Forerunners of “New Monetary Economics” Proposals to Stabilize the Unit of Account: Note on JSTOR. Accessed July 11, 2024.
[10] Walter Zander, A Way Out of the Monetary Chaos, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics vol. 12, no. 1 (1936), pp. 285–305. Available at https://beyondmoney.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/a-way-out-of-the-monetary-chaos-clean.pdf, Section (21) Summary. Accessed July 3, 2024.[11] That presentation description and video are available at https://beyondmoney.net/2007-tour-reports/malaysia-presentation/. Accessed July 3, 2024.
[12] Appendix B — An Objective Composite Standard Measure of Value. https://beyondmoney.net/appendix-b-an-objective-composite-standard-measure-of-value/. Accessed July 12, 2024
[13] Op. cit. Timberlake, p. 415.
[14] Op. cit. Steil.
[15] Futurist Alvin Toffler is widely credited with coining the term prosumer, which combines the words producer and consumer.
[16] Op. cit. Zander.