THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

common to all our familiar national currencies and the social effects
they tend to generate.
Today's money
All money systems serve to facilitate exchanges among people.
Whenever a specific financial system is designed, the remarkable
motivating power of money is invariably used to load the system
with a host of other objectives - sometimes conscious, often
unconscious from the prestige of the gods or the ruler, to collective
socio-economic motivations.
The main characteristics of today's system were pieced together in
pre- Victorian England, just in time to trigger the Industrial
Revolution. Its legacy - the money system that prevails today looks as
if its designers had asked: how can we create a money system that
reinforces our nation-state, and concentrates resources to enable
systematic and competitive heavy industrial development?
Even if its designers never asked such a question, the system has
proved remarkably successful in meeting these objectives. Every
country in the world, regardless of its level of development or its
political orientation, has bought into this pre-Victorian construct.
Even Communist countries have reproduced all its key features,
except that banks became state-owned rather than private, which in
practice did not prove beneficial.
Four key design features
All Industrial Age currencies have four key characteristics in
common, which gradually came to be considered as self-evident for
the first time in England between the 17th and early 18th centuries.
It's not as if some conspiratorial group of Englishmen gathered in a
dark, smoked-filled room to dream up the current money system.