Bernard Lietaer Has Died

Source: Real Currencies

by Anthony Migchels • February 6, 2019

Bernard Lietaer has died yesterday, or by now the day before yesterday, February 4th.

R.I.P.

I only met him once, and know nothing of him personally, but his work has a special place in my heart.

When Bill Still's Money Masters film suddenly shook me out of my political immaturity, the first real question I had was: 'ok, when Bankers rule, they’ll rule through money. So I better find out what the hell money actually is.'

This was a quite pertinent question, and I remember that stage vividly. And within days, in a completely natural synchronicity, Bernard's essential book, ‘Het Geld van de Toekomst', 'The Future of Money' landed in my lap.

This book is brilliant, and quite groundbreaking. It lays out in detail what money is, what the current problems of money are. Including an introduction into the problems of Usury. And it provides one of the first (to my knowledge) rational comparative analyses of several major basic complementary currency designs.

Something I later built on quite substantially in the articles consolidated in the interest-free-economics page on the blog. (https://realcurrencies.wordpress.com/interest-free-economics). And of course in the research and development of De Florijn (and the underlying Talent Architecture).

To this day I use (ok, very slightly improved) his basic definition of money: 'anything that is agreed upon within a community to be used as a means of exchange). In fact, I was just mentioning it earlier today in an interview for Alwareness TV, an Amsterdam based independent media outlet.

Lietaer, in his seldomly astute and truthful analyses most certainly laid a solid groundwork for my own work, and I'm positive he had quite an impact on many more people.

Please go to Real Currencies to read the entire article.
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Related:

The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

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