[p2p-research] anti-microfinance movement in nicaragua protests usury

[Kevin Carson]

On 11/19/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> The capital comes from outside.  All the administration in all situations of
> which I am aware of...is always local.  In fact, it doesn't work if it isn't
> local. The peer pressure of local lenders (almost always small NGOs) is what
> helps keep payments flowing.
>
> I have tried to find something wrong with the schemes...tried to be open to
> criticisms from Yale, etc.  I can say in my own rather careful review that
> these organizations do great things with and for people...I know of no
> organization making money off of micro-credit.  If the capital could be
> found locally, that would be best...for now, not likely.

I agree the situation is much better with such activity than without.

The problem is the barriers to finding the capital locally.  I wish
there were some way to facilitate local people monetizing their own
future productive capacities, without the need for outside money at
all.  To me the heart of the issue is the conception of money as a
store of past value, rather than a simple accounting system for
facilitating the exchange of present and future production.

The capital exists locally right now, if you include the productive
capacities currently existing in the household and informal economy.
There needs to be some way of leveraging it, for  people who have no
access to outside money.  Possibly relevant is Hernando De Soto's "The
Mystery of Capital," which argued that the informal property held by
hundreds of millions of people in the Third World was an enormous
potential  source of capital, if some mechanism existed for borrowing
from it.  And I would argue that the existing productive potential of
labor, if it could be leveraged as a source of credit, would be an
analogous vehicle for investing in increased productive capacity.  Tom
Greco's idea  of mutual credit-clearing networks is highly relevant
IMO.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html