Public Banks as the Antithesis of Neoliberalism

[eridani]

http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/public_banks_as_the_antithesis_of_neoliberalism

Which brings us to public banking—everything from large-scale infrastructure and business lending (if we actually want to make market economies work for everyone, or if we want to experiment with alternatives, public banks to finance those alternatives), to postal or other banks to lend credit and even facilitate direct cash transfers or basic income as it becomes increasingly clear that old models of business and productivity do not account for new economic realities, from labor-saving innovations to the ecologically necessary transition away from extraction and exploitation.

Public banks work. They fund public goods, they can be engineered to facilitate sustainable economies, they can be made 100% transparent and democratically accountable, and they have no institutional incentive to gamble on misfortune and misery. Utilizing them would shatter the illusion that there is some kind of fiscal scarcity that functions in the same way as the scarcity of natural resources. The very existence of public banks capable of democratizing the creation of money refutes false scarcity and clarifies what we don’t have enough of (and must therefore manage) and what we have an abundance of (and must therefore share).

One can and should read the literature for and against public banking, the variety of methods to implement it, and the experiences of those groups around the United States who have been pushing for several years now to get public banking bills out of committee and onto legislative floors. One should observe how vociferously and vacuously opponents of public banking—so very often supported by big private financial interests—churn out bad arguments against it. But if you don’t have time to study all of that, the foundational justification for public finance is simple: Although material resources are scarce, money is a social construct. That doesn’t mean we ought to create money carelessly, but it does mean we create money. So the only questions are who ought to control that process, and how to prioritize the applications of its power. The people should be in control, and private interests making money from money is socially destructive.