My feeling is that shillings need to be delineated further in terms of purpose. They not only need to be the chosen currency in the bank accounts of ordinary people, but need to be the currency of operation of all enterprises which shouldn't be profit-making. So it becomes a matter of decisions being made on whether or not the NHS should make profits, the rail system should make profits, the post office ditto, the road network ditto, and so on. As soon as we have decided that a certain sector should be non-profit, shillings become its currency. Current private operators are served notice on the termination of their contracts, and we begin the process of recasting needed to make these sectors actually efficient again i.e. strongly providing a service as fully as possible, with the greatest benefit to the most people.
As a result a network develops, between the enterprises that are there for everyone's good and don't require the profit motive, in fact suffer from its inclusion, and the people who work in them. A huge sector which is exclusively involved in providing for the people in the wellbeing of their ordinary lives. The principles of Modern Monetary Theory are used to supply the funds for those needs to be met. Obviously there would be interactions with the world of the pound, where goods and services are needed which are produced by the profit-making sector. But it's interesting that the process of provisioning would highlight those areas very clearly because there would need to be payments in pounds by the accounts departments of these public shillings-based enterprises. One could then look at whether or not funding the new production of those particular goods and services would be worthwhile for the public purpose to be involved in, or whether it was more efficient to remain a purchaser-in of them in pounds. So we have a situation where some new enterprises could come about if the model of public production was worthwhile, so as to provision enterprises we already run: an expanding sector in terms of results achieved, rather than profits made i.e. the right sort of expansion for the public sector. Because of course not only are necessaries produced, but people are employed, all outside the world of profit-taking by individuals.
Which helps me to circle back to what some may see as a truism, but something I feel it's good to underline. A likening may help. Imagine, in your rounds on the web, you go in for your daily session on Youtube. And you gravitate for some reason to gruesome medical videos, which abound there. And you are fascinated, and appalled, by one showing a transection of the lungs of a dead creature which has died because of a parasitic attack: there are loads of wormish-leechish parasites glued en masse to the lungs, which had been sucking the lifeblood away from the creature and caused its death. They are awful to see in such huge numbers, wriggling and swaying in their hundreds - to think of attached and sucking inside a living body, killing it by denuding it of lifeblood.
In a strong sense, that's what a culture of profit-taking in publicly necessary systems is. It's a siphoning away of useful resources to private pockets. One can picture those shareholders and private owners as these parasites. But what we do instead is lionise them as public providers, inexplicably avoiding the realities of the situation. Somehow we've lost confidence in our ability to supply ourselves with our needs, like we've been the victim of a confidence-trick. We've been sold a story about inefficiency when we do it, efficiency when they do it, which is the obverse of true.
But of course there are points which needs addressing. The main one, expressed in a slightly bilious and superior way, by exponents of private-ownership efficiency is "well, I remember the 70s and nationalised industries, I remember how awful it all was". Of course, there are a couple of issues here. The first, to their credit, is the fact that no doubt there were inefficiencies in those old nationalised enterprises. But they were nothing out of the ordinary, and often the result of poor management or corrupt unions, not the inherent inefficiency of the enterprises themselves. Certainly not the result of the fact that those enterprises should have been privately owned. The faults were next level down - management issues. But these strictly management issues were manipulated into being seen as fundamentally structural - in order to hive these enterprises off to a sector where they became less efficient than ever: worse issues were created, rather than the existing issues fixed. The evidence? Well, we have only to look around us.
Which leaves us with this fact, contrarily: note that in this split scenario of some public enterprises, some private ones, the world of profit-making is still in existence. There is nothing overly wrong in essence with taking a profit. The wrong comes in with where it happens. If you're a private individual or shareheld company making sweets or PVC tubing or bicycle locks, good luck to you in your profit-seeking. But if we're talking about the provision of services for public wellbeing, the opposite is true. So, we have an imagined world here where the full panoply of colour of human endeavour is retained, we're not envisaging a grey Stalinist nightmare. We're simply being intelligent about how we do what we do, with the strong proviso that people need looking after as a first principle. Profit is a second-level issue, not a first.
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