Now that my blog has had over 167,000 visits, it's possible that some of you might like to have the entire contents of my blog as a fully clickable pdf file. Thanks to BlogBooker, I have been able to generate a Word file document that have edited to remove (a large number of) typos, and generally clean up. Using Word for Windows (but not Word for Mac :-( ), you can generate a pdf file with all the different posts indexed.
You can download the result here, and since I have used Bit.ly to shorten the Dropbox link, I will even be able to find out how many people have downloaded it, and (roughly) where you live - well, which country you live in.
But be warned. My blog now runs to over 300,000 words. It takes up over 600 pages of single spaced A4 text, using a font size of 10 (!). And it will use up 31 Mbytes of disk space! Even I'm impressed, and I wrote it all!
One nice thing that I noted when reading rapidly through the whole thing is that there is hardly a word that I would now reject - even though my ideas have evolved enormously over the 4 and a half years that have elapsed since I started this blog in October 2010.
Hi again Simon, congratulations!
ReplyDeleteAlthough I have read quite a few of your blogs, it is far from 600 pages that I absorbed. Nevertheless, may I summarize the subjects I like most to read about:
· Full reserve banking instead of fractional banking (or: ending debt-based private money creation by banks),
· Sovereign (non-debt-based) money supply, solely by central banks,
· Unconditional basic income,
· QE into the public budget or people's pockets instead of financial markets,
· Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) as an alternative and major public source of income
· … [what did I forget ?]
Although sometimes we discuss about details, I usually agree with the main points of your blogs. Now my question to you for each of your proposals: are there examples, anywhere in the world, any time in history, that come close to your advocated solutions and how do (did) they work out in practice. It would be good to have some empirical backing of the ideas you promote. I don't have to be convinced. But if there are hardly such examples or none at all, then how come that obvious solutions have never been effectuated?
Regards, Douwe
Hi Douwe,
ReplyDeleteI'm hardly surprised that you haven't managed to get through all 600 pages. But if anyone does, I promise to buy them a beer!!
Your list of my favorite topics isn't bad, but there are quite a few other ideas to explore. If you have 1 hour to spare, I would recommend that you watch the talk I gave recently to the Toulouse School of Economics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQIducYlrjA which runs through a number of them.
In particular, I'm really quite proud of my N-Euro proposal for a parallel debt-free currency that could be created by states. And then there's the OWE'M system for Citizen's Credit Creation.
I also mention two other ideas that are not my ideas, but which actually work already. One is Public Banking - the idea proposed by Ellen Brown in her book on subject. Essentially, it keeps the standard bank based money creation, but feeds back the interest into the public good.
The other idea that is being tried are Crytocurrencies like Bitcoin. Such systems prove that we can definitely function without renting the units of exchange from commercial banks. But it would be so much better if such a system was introduced by a government.
Otherwise, there are only a few cases where any of the ideas I propose have even been discussed, let alone implemented!
Simon