Classical monetary systems regularly subject the most vulnerable majority of
the world's population to debilitating financial shocks, and have manifestly
allowed uncontrolled global inequality over the long term. Given these basic
failures, how can we avoid asking whether mainstream macroeconomic principles
are actually compatible with democratic principles such as equality or the
protection of human rights and dignity? This idea paper takes a constructive
look at this question, by exploring how alternate monetary principles might
result in a form of money more compatible with democratic principles -- dare we
call it "democratic money"? In this alternative macroeconomic philosophy, both
the supply of and the demand for money must be rooted in people, so as to give
all people both equal opportunities for economic participation. Money must be
designed around equality, not only across all people alive at a given moment,
but also across past and future generations of people, guaranteeing that our
descendants cannot be enslaved by their ancestors' economic luck or misfortune.
Democratic money must reliably give all people a means to enable everyday
commerce, investment, and value creation in good times and bad, and must impose
hard limits on financial inequality. Democratic money must itself be governed
democratically, and must economically facilitate the needs of citizens in a
democracy for trustworthy and unbiased information with which to make wise
collective decisions. An intriguing approach to implementing and deploying
democratic money is via a cryptocurrency built on a proof-of-personhood
foundation, giving each opt-in human participant one equal unit of stake. Such
a cryptocurrency would have both interesting similarities to, and important
differences from, a Universal Basic Income (UBI) denominated in an existing
currency.