Non Monetary Pot Production and Allocation Model.

[Otishertz]

I wrote a plan to produce and allocate a fungible crop without money or wages using barter concepts including time banks, complimentary currencies, grain warehouse receipts, and the ideas of Silvio Gesell.

The system is designed around Oregon’s OMMP laws which outlaw most of the prevailing market and monetary system for the production of cannabis. The OMMP is unique in that it mandates a gift economy and essentially describes cashless barter and crop share. It provides a rare real world case case study of what happens when crucial variables of the marketplace have been forcibly removed.

Plan O primarily deals with the non horticultural issues of deploying land, labor, capital and initiative without normal prices, wages, or profit and how to build incentives into a system where consideration is illegal. Plan O explains how time banks unleash and utilize skilled labor without wages to create economic activity without money. Negotiated time value creates variable pricing and an alternative non-monetary valuation mechanism.

The plan models a supply, distribution, and incentive system for marijuana production that can work without money or wages based on literal interpretation of Oregon’s OMMP laws which prohibit wages and profit. Community commodity banking provides the store of value. This organizational structure can more easily be applied to other commodities and crops that do not have legal problems.

The entire Plan O is here:

http://www.otisgardens.com/forum/index.php?topic=128.0

Other aspects to the plan:

1. Shared crop necessitates cooperation toward common goals for shared common interest of bountiful harvests which is a better community structure than self interested competition that breeds hoarding and dishonesty.

2. Commodity account balances have a maximum value related to legal weight limits. This is uniquely egalitarian because no one person can have more cannabis than the law allows. This fosters increased production and rapid turnover since getting your share more times is one of the only legal ways to get more.

3. Time bank volunteer networks are a liberating way for people to capture value from fallow skills that are needlessly waiting for a dollar that isn’t coming. Time banks create economic activity in the absence of money and thereby enable survival without money. Time bank hours can provide an alternate medium of exchange. Negotiated time value is more egalitarian. CEO’s would not be able to negotiate 250 – 2000 times worker pay for themselves.

4. Commodity shares based on warehouse receipts can function as a store of value and medium of exchange. A medium of exchange that is directly backed by a locally produced commodity is not inflationary because there are no extra shares are created beyond the quantity of cannabis that has been produced.

5. Depreciative money combined with maximum balances reduces hoarding and accumulation of advantage. This further focuses the community on increasing the total crop since there are only two ways for OMMP patients to get more: by increasing crop frequency or increasing yield and crop size.

6. No free riders = No rentiers. Everyone is a stakeholder and individual exchanges can only be increased through active involvement.

Doing these things only requires will and cheap or free tools like open source software combined with ubiquitous communication devices. People need a way to meet their needs outside of the failed credit money system and can do it by organized sharing. There is no reason for skilled people to sit around waiting for a dollar to validate their abilities. They can trade their labor among themselves and capture real value.

Real community democracy and freedom through cooperation are possible by capturing the inherent value in small world networks for the mutual benefit of members. This value is in underutilized skills, shared connections, and shared resources. When those three things are connected there is a synergistic community wealth building effect that occurs as exchanges proliferate. Increasing exchanges grows the community.

We as a species can do better things with technology than spy on eachother or merely “Like” things on facebook (the only choice.) The same chains of our enslavement can also link us together in self sufficiency. All that is required is for people to look at things a little differently.

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