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This is going to be a long post, so I apologise in advance. Michael
has touched on a subject that I feel very passionately about, as passionately as
I feel about cooperative enterprise or the Christian Gospel. I've always
found cities to be extremely interesting from an economic point of
view. In shaping my own viewpoint toward cities has been shaped
largely by Jane Jacobs and Kenichi Ohmae. I believe a discussion of cities and
their role in economic development is very relevant to discussion of Social
Credit.
Taken together Jacobs and Ohmae have shown in a rather compelling
manner that the city and its region are the irreducible and fundamental
formation of global economic power. They argue that the nation-state is
fast becoming less important as a player on the world stage, and the emerging
global order will be based upon the acts of dynamic city-regions which are
increasingly unfettered by the existence of
national frontiers. City-regions are now, indeed always have,
subverted the rigid and heavy-handed hegemony of centralized
nation-states.
Jacobs in particular expounds on the role cities play in economic
development so I'll leave a discussion of Kenichi Ohmae to another time, as
Jacobs is more relevant here.. According to Jacobs economic development
and growth are the result of processes taking place in
city-regions. Cities can be thought of as the true organisms of economic
development and growth because it is in cities that a framework for social
structures of wealth accumulation, innovation and land stewardship necessary for
the organization and assimilation of capital, labor, research and
development and so forth, are found. Says Jacobs, "Economies
develop by grace of innovation and grow
by force of import replacement." Through the innovative framework of
social structures found in cities, new technologies, new processes and new
products are developed. Industries cluster in cities where universities and
firms with large R&D budgets are found. At the same time cities are,
according to Jacobs "where real markets are and where real work gets
done. " Since cities are where real markets are I can imagine
that one could argue that's where the cultural heritage is as well.
City economies grow when when they can assimilate the new developments in
technology, processes and products that have been developed elsewhere, thus
replacing their imports. This assimilation takes place when when there is
labor and skill competencies enough and capital enough to replace a
city's imports with its own production. As cities replace imports they can
afford to buy their own local production and they in turn will export their
production to other cities occupying similar places on the "ladder of
economic development." They become new competitors to cities that
developed imported innovations initially.
Now here's where it should get really interesting in a discussion of the
development of cities and Social Credit. Jacobs tells us that cities
are in one of two phases in the economic development cycle
mentioned in the last paragraph: a development/export phase and an
import/import replacement phase. Cities in different phases of the economic
development cycle often co-exist in the same centralised nation-state with the
same uniform tax code, banking, industrial and monetary policies enforced on all
cities within its borders regardless of what phase a city may be in.
By this means nation-states create faulty feedback to cities, faulty
because it is aggregated and undifferentiated by cycle. The most
problematic took that nation-states keep in their arsenal is that of currencies,
which act as gatekeepers of any economy, regulating an economy's flow of exports
and imports. Jacobs suggests that since city-regions are where the
meaningful economic processes take place, city-regions ought to have their own
currencies.
I simply wonder what the technical assistance providers among Social
Creditors would do with an opportunity to implement Social Credit in a state or
city-region (metropolitain area with a sufficiently diverse economic base) where
Social Credit will have to be built parallel to the currency of a federal
government or sizable unitary state. | 
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