In Quest of National Idea:
“Energy Ruble” Bound To Be the Hardest Currency
Contradictory political situation has emerged in this country. Western liberal political ideas have worked themselves out; they have brought discredit upon themselves in the estimation of the public. The State Duma election results are mafifestive of that. At the same time, the economic policy of Russia remains conspicuously pro-western, aiming to turn the country into a source of raw materials for the West. The country is unable to efficiently develop provided the two mutually exclusive lines are followed simultaneously. A Unified Conception of Social Security has become an extremely urgent issue; a reasonable mix of politics and economy to provide the formation of some crisis-free trends of development.
The contemporary crisis of our nationhood is mainly caused by inadequacy of Social Science to the ontic reality of life, which leads to the lack of statecraft methodology or welfare management. None of the manuals on Economics puts a question of how a state gets wealthy; they focus on the art of getting rich within a single corporation, a single bank, or give a piece of advice to individual wealth. Nevertheless, in real life the corporate effect proves to be achieved at the expense of some damage done to the state and society.
The country has everything it takes to reach the goals set by the President in his address, namely, the acceleration of economic growth and the external convertibility of ruble. The country possesses quite sufficient sources of energy, a surplus resource potential, qualified work force, and our home demand is stable. However we have never made proper use of our opportunities on account of some glaring faults of methodological character. The commodity-and-monetary control needs the accommodation of interests of both financial and industrial sectors, state interests and the interests of the global financial and commodity markets.
The nation’s financial system functionally resembles the haemal system of a human body. Blood supplies a precisely defined amount of oxygen to every single part of the body and carries away the corresponding amount of carbon dioxide. In the same way money can ‘supply’ the required resources for development purposes, raw materials, and power resources to every single business, as well as carry away the marketable output. In case there is a shortage of money and the system is bleeding white, all the organs of such system will be collapsing (‘head’ stands for ‘science’, ‘feet’ – for the ‘agriculture sector’, ‘hands’ – for the ‘industry’, etc).
Over the past 13 years, inflation has exceeded the increment of money supply tenfold, which distorted the balance of money in hand and the technological need in it. Russian economy has been purposely demonetized to hit one of the bottom positions in the world rating. This ‘blood’ loss was behind the collapse of all the parts of industrial sector, and the intentionally created ruble vacuum was designed to be filled with US dollars and other monetary substitutes.
There is no need at all to talk about the banking sector ‘development’ if we are aiming at establishment of the financial atmosphere that would facilitate real production. Banking could ‘develop’ for the account of finance pumped out of industry by means of interest rate. We need to restore the functionally appropriate relation of ‘money supply to GDP’ by a ‘one-shot blood transfusion’ operation, which may though take some time. The development-bound incrase of the money supply has to be a strictly targeted operation so that we could pull down the national debt, develop high-tech industries, get rid of the most excruciating social problems. The aggregate money supply will have to correspond to the capacities and technological needs of the national economy complex, and it has to be backed by the domestic ‘ordinary product’, not by gold-and-hard currency reserves. In order to eliminate the artificial money supply deficit, the Treasury of the Russian Federation is supposed to become the ‘blood donor’, coming up with its’ legal tender notes (bills) for 5 times as much amount as the current money supply provided by the notes of the Bank of Russia. To avoid inflation, the amount of Treasury bills issued after the deficiency has been cleared should strictly follow the GDP growth.
State Budget acts as a core source of funds and a money supply in the leading industrialized countries. It is exactly the instrument that defines priorities and shapes the nation’s development directions. State priorities stimulate the growth of the affiliated industries and build up human resources of the nation. The monetary base of the Japanese yen is backed by gold-currency reserves by 3%, and it is 71% secured by budgetary needs and by corresponding government notes. The monetary base of the US dollar is secured by 7% and 92%, accordingly.
The XX-th century brought sweeping changes to the production of commodities. It’s origin changed from biogenous to technogenous, and nowadays up to 95% of goods are being produced not with the use of human muscle power, but technically generated power. It is the power, energy that de facto plays the role of invariant goods. While calculating the costs of a loaf of bread, a brick, or a pig aluminum you will realize that it could only be done by taking into account the amount of energy used in the course of their extraction or/and manufacturing.