Introduction: Money, Finance, and Production in Contemporary Commercial Republics

This chapter lays out in detail the consolidated public balance sheet—the “Citizens’ Ledger”—that Chapter 5 schematized in broad outline. On the liability side of the balance sheet, the Chapter shows, will be a universal digital public savings and payments platform—the essential commercial infrastructure first broached in the book’s Prologue. On the asset side, in turn, will be digital credit and other financial instruments associated with bona fide productive, not speculative, investment in projects thate grow real wealth for enterprising citizens and firms. Democratically accountable means of digitally assuring that only productive, as distinguished from merely speculative, investments receive public or publicly backed digital funding are developed from historical precedent— notably older forms of American and German banking, central banking, and public finance. New digital technologies, the chapter shows, offer us “new and improved” ways of doing what we used to do well, while avoiding the middleman-wrought harms that despoiled our earlier systems.