“No more BANKS!” she said.
“Exactly!” he winked at her and turned back to step up on the
platform. “Julie is right. In a time based economy, there would be no
such thing as a bank or any such distribution institution. That is, after
all, what a bank really is—a distributor. They, not the government,
take the paper bills and issue them to the public. Ever wonder why
you don’t go to a government building to get your money? Why
aren’t there U.S. Treasury ATM’s on every corner, instead of ‘The First
National Bank of Bayonne’? The reason is the Federal Reserve Act of
1913. It gave the distribution rights to the banks, exclusively, through
the newly created Federal Reserve Board. But that was 1913! Long
before computers, the Internet, cell phones, wireless networks and
everything else that we have today. The Fed now stands in the way of
us realizing the full potential of our technologies. Now that we have a
simple and secure technology to store and circulate time credits, why
do we need paper and an arcane system that supports it? Think about
it.”
“How can it work without cash?” someone asked.
“Think people, think… you have your smart card, like you use
now on campus. You go to work and your employer credits the hours
you labored directly onto your card. Your employer keeps accounts of
all your work time, same as they do today. When you buy something
you use your smart card and the credits go from your card over to the
store. They in turn, use those credits to buy products to stock their
shelves from manufacturers. Much of our transactions today are
cashless already. They are just so many bits and bytes of computer
data moved back and forth. There is no need to retain paper or coin,
for our current economy to function. It could all be done with plastic,
right?”
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