Freiwirtschaft

Just yesterday I found an interesting idea that could help to stabilize the ever self-destabilizing financial system, as is apparent in the current financial / economic crisis. The concept is called “Freiwirtschaft” (literally, “free economy”):

• “Freiwirtschaft” in the German Wikipedia (good introduction)
• “Freiwirtschaft” in the English Wikipedia (incomplete)

Now I’m not a liberalist (any more): people cannot deal with too much freedom as long as they are not responsible enough (“good enough”) to do so. Therefore I don’t propose to introduce Freiwirtschaft as it is, but to take the good ideas from it and combine it with others and have some limited experiments run with approx. 10,000 participants, before introducing it in a whole society. More concretely, I’d propose to combine Freigeld (“free money”) and Freihandel (“free trade”); but instead of “Freiland”, the society should be divided into autarchic communities that are owners of some land each and will provide food for themselves.

Which is of course an Utopia when it comes to introduce something like that in Western societies. It would mean a forceful change of culture, which is impossible to do. Most people in Western societies will never want to dedicate a part of their time to agriculture and other dirty work just to be “autarchic”. Not until they have to starve, but then it’s too late to implement that system …