The Dominion Exchange Page

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Exchanges are composed of between 3 and 15 persons. An Exchange is an economic unit or small group of persons that form a market. Any product or service provided by the free market or public sector can be provided using a Dominion Exchange. Public goods such as policing and health care and education can be produced with the same facility as conventional goods and services.

Exchanges can preferentially be registered as a charitable not-for-profit corporation. It may facilitate operations, for the time being to legitimize the enterprise in the eyes of the state.

Every member of the Exchange owns one voting share. Common Shares allow members to vote in elections and on policy initiatives and also to a share of the assets of the organization, were it sold. However, Exchanges are never sold or liquidated. Exchanges can be transformed in terms of their business operations, but Exchanges never become non-viable.

Exchanges also issue Preferred Shares as a form of voucher-based currency. Preferred Shares represent the equity of the corporation and are issued based on the value added to the assets of the organization.

Exchanges are as varied as the goods and services people need.

http://beef-exchange.com/

An Exchange has an average of 12 persons though the actual number is not important and will vary as needs dictate. So long as the numbers correspond to what is considered adequate to perform a function the number is sufficient to form an Exchange. The numbers are relevant only to the ability of the group to work effectively together.

God is a God of science and precision and numbers and orders of magnitude. God makes sense in measurable and quantifiable ways. Gods’ truth is not subjective or opinionated or without foundation. God created His world and so has the moral high ground. His rights and claims are morally defensible. The devil has mounted an offensive, but his claims are not defensible. Logic and science are both created by God and support God’s claims.

Caring for the planet is a measurable activity. As we add value to the planet, we can measure the value we create. We only need the tools of an accountant. Public and private enterprises may show they are making a profit when in fact liabilities are being externalized. Double entry bookkeeping permits the formation and externalization of liabilities and often encourages this. Perhaps a lawsuit will soon be filed, or an employee is defrauding the company. Accounting is never accurate in terms of its real costs, when Double Entry Bookkeeping is used. No company measures the pollution they create or adds this cost to the price of their products. But these are real costs generated by the company and someone must pay them.

Exchanges generate their own unit of account. Exchanges do not require banks or bureaucrats. Dominion Exchanges do not need the regulations of the state nor banks because they are free markets

Capitalization is done by donation or by direct transfers. Those who would like to see the business started, provide what is needed. Investors sell what is needed to the proposed start-up and are paid using preferred shares issued by the start up. In short, investors receive equity in recognition of their contribution.

Equity is a financial vehicle used to express value. A piece of equipment sold for $500.00 is an asset worth $500.00 and therefore represents $500.00 worth of equity.

Equity is represented by preferred shares. An Exchange that receives an asset valued at $500.00 is able to issue 500 preferred shares at $1.00 each. Preferred shares have economic value and can be exchanged for goods and services. Preferred shares represent a fully backed currency issued by the Exchange and used as a unit of value in all transactions.

Christians are required to divest themselves of personal wealth and yet they are required to be doers of good works, including the care of their families. The only way these parameters can be satisfied is through the formation of a Dominion Exchange. Personal property is permitted for the care of oneself and one’s family and is not an issue. What is on the table is capital or commercial assets. All surplus goods need to be used for the building up of the church. Not as a building or denomination but as a community.

What we have that is not being used to build up the church of God must be committed to building up of the nation of God. Our personal goods are those things that enable us to work for God. They make our foundation strong. What is not needed by us for our walk with the Lord is needed by others to help them in their walk. All those things which are surplus to our directed needs go towards the building up of the church.

Exchanges are missions that serve the church. The church is the wealth of this world not given over to Babylon. The church is everything not put into the hands of Satan and his minions.

By assuming ownership of all assets and issuing equity in the form of preferred shares we as individuals have sold all we have. The preferred shares we are given is currency to be used for the purchase of goods and services. These units of account can be freely given away because in so doing, they help build the church. There is no way to divert units of account issued by the church, into the economy of Satan i.e. Babylon.

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• Each person who donates goods or services or cash receives the same value in preferred shares. One preferred share is equal to one unit of the national currency. 
• Needs are identified. Donations are made consistent with servicing that need. This is called the capitalization phase. Donations are paid for with an issue of preferred shares.
• Every member of the Exchange has a seat at the Citizens Assembly. This is the basic unit of the Aprioria. An executive is appointed to chair the assembly. The chair appoints members to handle the set up and operation of the Exchange. The Assembly serves as a Board of Directors whereas the Dominion Exchange is the operational structure.
• All goods and services are paid for in preferred shares unless other arrangements are made. Over time, the use of the domestic currency is discontinued.
• All costs are paid for as much as possible using preferred share units. (Prefers ₽).
• Payments are made in prefers on a 1 to 1 ratio with the national currency. Thus, if something costs $10.00 it is priced at ₽10.00 or 10 preferred shares.
• In setting up an Exchange look to where the most value can be added to the church, look to where the need is greatest. Perhaps there is a surplus of tools and equipment in the hands of some members while there is a need for these things elsewhere. This imbalance serves as the foundation of a tool rental facility or a used tools and equipment store. Alternatively set up a workshop that can be leased or rented by members.
• If there is a need for an art gallery to display the work of a group of artists an art gallery could be set up.
• If the price of beef is a problem a Beef Exchange could be formed with members providing the money to purchase a side of beef and then selling this to members in a silent or Dutch Auction.
• Members could set up a babysitting business with some members providing the service for other members and the users of the service contracting to provide housekeeping or other services to benefit the babysitters. The point is to create jobs not simply to create work.
• Plumbers and other trades people could create an Exchange which served as a central office from which jobs could be assigned and paperwork maintained. Each member would be paid in prefers fully or partially and these spent in the community with participating retailers.
• What is set up is less important than the community identifying a need and supplying that need with what the community already has.
• As much as is possible the need for cash is reduced. If a food store could be encouraged to accept prefers and local farmers are willing to sell produce to this store for prefers then an economy based on prefers could be set up. As other local stores and service providers joined the market the need for domestic currency units would decline.
• Members always seek to replace businesses that need dollars with businesses that will take prefers.
• Products and services that can only be purchased with dollars are systematically replaced with products and services that are priced in prefers.
• All volunteers are paid. The more prefers circulating the larger the Apriorian economy.
• Housekeepers need to be paid an income using prefers.
• Students could be paid in prefers for getting good grades, and passing their exams, this would eliminate the need to pay extraordinary premiums to those who need to stay in school for long periods to get a higher education.
• It is a principle of the Exchange economy that all work that adds value to Aprioria (the community using prefers) ought to be paid.
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Most people will tell you that taxation is a necessary evil. Apriorans insist that taxation is evil but not necessary. In fact, if taxation was unavoidable, it would be erroneous to consider it evil. 

The reason why people dislike taxation and yet bow to its necessity is because people believe that the private sector cannot provide social goods. At this point it is imperative we ask which private sector? Because no doubt the other person is thinking about the private sector that is designed to produce what the public sector is less able to generate. The truth of the matter is that the public sector has never been able to take over the private sector successfully, and this is not for want of trying. However, the private sector is able to duplicate everything done by the public sector, just not in the present configuration.

The idea that the public sector is necessary, is as said, based on the mistaken notion the private sector cannot provide social goods. This nugget of conventional wisdom is something few seem to have looked at without holding to a lot of unnecessary assumptions. The state actually has no function and no capacity for action other than that of redirecting the private sector by means of a redistribution of assets. The closest approximation to a state we have, is a broker who buys and sells goods and services at the behest of a client. The state, however, has the power of attorney over its clients.

If a road is required, the one thing we can all be certain of it is that the government will not move more than a few shovels of dirt during the onset of construction. Nor will the state use a cent of its own money. The state will be absent until the project is completed and it is time to open the road to traffic and accept the accolades of a grateful public. These celebrations will also be paid for by the public.

The entire contribution of the state is to extract the funds needed for the project and write cheques to the participating contractors. The process could be looked at as one in which the buyer, the travelling public and shippers, order a road. A third party goes around and levies the cost of the road from various sources, not all who drive but who seem to have a capacity to pay a share of the total cost. Then this third party assigns the work to various sellers, the contractors. When the road is completed, the third party (the state) pays the seller(s) of the road work, and proudly hands the finished product (the road) over to the buyer (but with reservations and restrictions. 

The question then becomes one of why could not the travelling public and the shipping sector not purchase a road in the sense of paying the contractors through a broker?

The usual response to the private provision of public goods, is that it would pay users not to pay their fair share. It pays a trucker to claim he had no use for the road, wait for it to be built and then make use of it. The interesting thing is that the state solution actually exacerbates this problem. It benefits the trucking sector to both claim they have no real use for the road and will not use it or cannot afford it while hoping that the road will be built out of the general revenues. Most public goods are used by those who did not have the means to pay their share.

Accepting that taking advantage of a porous system is natural and will happen if allowed to, does not mean the thing to do is to develop a system in which no one is even expected to pay for what they want. Taxation institutionalizes this tendency to exploit a weakness in the system.

The error communities make is in adopting a democratic market approach in which individuals get to choose if they will participate or not. Of course, Joe the trucker will vote to abstain from purchasing a share of a road he can acquire for free. This may not be moral, but it is rational at least in the short run.

The problem we face as a democratic society is created by democracy itself. It is not rational to permit people to vote, when they have no obligation to abide by the outcome. We see this refusal to carry ones share of the load while demanding more than one’s share of the benefits, more and more. A vote has become a means to force others to side with you when you have no intention of supporting them. Even presidential elections conclude with a refusal to support the other side, when the democrats lose. 

What we are doing as a society is using democracy to try and settle issues that cannot be settled. Because the situation is immoral and unfair. We cannot debate or negotiate with evil or compromise with free loaders as to the sharing of what we produced.

When the truckers decide to have a road built this cost must be born by everyone who uses the road commercially. This means that instead of the state levying every sector and every business and individual for the means to build a road the trucking sector buys the road from the construction sector. Those who drive pay the cost of driving, including the cost of providing roads. Driving is not a right paid for by the public, but a commodity purchased by the consumer of roads.

Roads are a service and miles driven a product that can and ought to be sold. This eliminates the need for taxation and the need for the public sector. 

A road is not a product in the sense that a bag of carrots is. The buyer and seller of a road are not individuals but economic sectors. But we ought not sell roads but travel. 

Let’s scale the economic transaction back to the level of buyer and seller of a driveway. The homeowner hires a contractor to put in a driveway. This is a simple transaction because it involves two persons, a buyer and a seller.

Now let’s move up the scale to a housing development. Here we have one man, the owner or boss of the development who hires a contractor to put in 100 driveways and several roads. This contractor may do all of the work through his own company or with the help of other companies who he subcontracts. But each contract is essentially a transaction between two persons.

However, once the homes are built and sold, we have a situation in which 100 individual owners are making use of 100 individual private driveways and say five public roads. Usually what happens in these cases is that the government takes over the maintenance of the roads and other public utilities. But there are cases as in condominiums where the public space is internal to the structure. In these cases, a Board of Directors is elected with the authority to act as a governing authority. In such a situation the chairperson acts in the role of the buyer or seller and Chief Executive Officer for the condominium corporation.

If the housing development remained as a gated community, then the roads would remain in private hands, and the individual homeowners would each be under the authority of the agency created to govern the public elements. So, we are seeing that public utilities can and are created and maintained by private entities even within the present system.

So, how true is the statement, that nothing is more certain than death and taxes? 

Moving up the scale think of a community. But think of this community in the way we think of a gated community. We will postulate the town has 3000 homes and dozens of roads. The town, under the present system, votes in a Council and a Mayor and these officials are told a road is in poor shape and needs repair. The town takes money from those who pay taxes, makes a sum available to the Director of Public Works who, acting as a General Contractor, hires companies to do the work. The contractors are paid out of the general revenues.

What is wrong with the process is that this is not how the free market works, it is not how human beings are meant to act. This process does not reflect how a community is supposed to operate. The system exists because we have a state that will not relinquish power. The little it does let go of comes with innumerable restrictions and qualifications. Which is why the economy is so problematical and difficult to operate.

To understand the nature of the free market one has to understand the the rights of dominion and realize we have a right to what we create, and no obligation to pay the costs that were created by others.

There is no reason why a contractor could not build homes, roads, schools or any of the other things needed by the community, and be paid for the work they do, by the community. All it takes is a record of the hours worked and an agreed upon rate of pay, which is then credited to the appropriate accounts.

This happens in reverse when we consume something. The price reflects the labor expended on producing it and the portion consumed by the buyer.

If you are a doctor you treat those who show up needing treatment. The community credits your account for the work you do. Those who use your services have their accounts debited for the price of your services. Everyone works because it never pays the community to pay people not to work.

If everyone works, everyone can pay for the services they use.

If everyone works then they can work at the things in demand by the community. We are all both consumer and producer. If we get free things as a consumer, we hurt ourselves as a producer. The reverse is true. If we do not work, we hurt ourselves as a consumer.

Our two roles must be in harmony. It is up to the community to keep the two identities in balance through a monitoring of debits and credits.

This is a simple overview, but the details are not difficult to imagine. It is possible to have a community without the state and without taxation but with all the goods we use and need.