The principle of relativity as defined by Albert Einstein postulates that “the laws of physics are identically expressed (have the same form) in all and every referential” (inertial frames of reference or not). We call it also “principle of symmetry” or “covariance”. The principle does not mean that the observers measure the same thing, but that the laws of physics that are established must, following their transformation from one to another frame of reference, have the same general form. So the measures are very different from one observer to the other, the only invariable one is the speed of light.
As for economy, I have extended this principle to the notion of money, “money, as a universal code that rules economic exchanges, must work identically in any frame of reference” and of value “any individual is free to estimate what is value and what is not”.
In economy, any couple observer/frame of reference is an individual within his monetary zone, and principles must be valid and have the same form, in whichever space-time position is considered. It is about applying the 1 st article of the Declaration of Human Rights regarding the equality of rights between individuals, applying it not only to the code that rules the common currency, but also to the relative measure of all value, which is also the understanding of individual’s freedom of choice regarding value, at the level of its production as well as its exchange.
In other words “no individual must be privileged regarding judgment and measure of value”.
We cannot either establish a coherent theoretical overview without having specified the fundamental liberties it refers to. Those liberties are missing from the classical theories for the wrong reason: they ignore them.
We refer to “value” as any economic good that is physical or non-physical, energetic, spacial or temporal. For example, we can attribute a value to a fruit, electricity, a software, a terrain or a teaching. The principle of relativity denies any absolute measurement of value. Any value fluctuates relatively to the individual that uses it, produces it or exchanges it, and thus fluctuates in the considered space-time.
The principle of freedom must comply with any present and future individual and allows to define the three fundamental economic freedoms in form of the following fundamental axioms:
Any citizen is free to exchange with others “in the currency”
As freedom is defined as non-nuisance, we must not fall into the basic and logical error which would consist in interpreting the economic freedoms as the freedom to violate others’ property or to produce or exchange outside what is permitted by Law.
So how can we interpret the “resources access freedom”? We must interpret this under the angle of non-nuisance as in the “Lockean proviso”:
“When someone appropriates an object, there must be enough of it in common left for the others and in similar quality”.
For example, one does not have the right to seize the only source of water of a desert, without ensuring that a minimal access to water is guaranteed for everyone.
An open code as defined by the free software world consists of an open-source code of a computer program, modifiable by its users. This principle of “freedom of code” is fundamentally compatible with the principle of Relativity, because if the Laws are independent of the frame of reference, it means that they are neither hidden, nor inaccessible via experimentation wherever we are.
But money is actually a hidden proprietary code, in the sense that money is controlled by rules not democratically modifiable (essentially the rules of Basel I, II and soon III, which are established in no way through a democratic process), and the operations made through the Banking system concerning the emission of asymmetrical credits are not transparent. The historic crisis of the “Subprime lending” with its peak in 2008 is the latest illustration of it.
According to the consequences of the “digital perspective” revealed by Olivier Auber, the choice of a system implies the choice of the code that rules it, and that is not neutral. We have then to question the transparency and the legitimacy of the code.
It implies that the freedom of the code which rules the system (here money, which is the code of all economic exchanges), is a prior concept to the choice, if not there is simply no choice, therefore no freedom. According to that criteria defended by the inventor of “free software” Richard Stallman, if you accept to use a system where the code is not free, you deprive yourself of fundamental freedoms.
The consequence of a monetary system with a hidden code is the emergence of an economy where the value field is an auto-reproductive and unstable pyramidal structure. On the other side the consequence of the usage of a free monetary system is the emergence of an economy where the field of value is a spherical structure in space-time expansion, compatible with the renewal of generations.
However, we will make a difference between the software freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which are four in number, and those linked to the freedoms of a communication or exchange protocol such as money, which cannot be modified individually without cutting oneself out of the community that uses it. So for the free software, the freedoms defined by the FSF are:
Freedom of use
Freedom to access and to read the source code
Freedom to modify the source code
Freedom to copy and distribute
Which are different from the four freedoms that have to be associated to an open monetary system:
Freedom of democratic modification
Freedom to access resources
Freedom to produce value
Freedom to exchange “in the money”
Examples: In 2011, the Euro cannot be considered as a money of a free monetary system because its code (the treaties on the monetary code) are not modified by a democratic process.
We can speak about the Euro as a currency depriving of freedoms, or as a proprietary monetary system, at least in the sense of the first freedom, and even more according to the fourth freedom as we shall see later.
Another example: gold. We can talk about gold as a monetary candidate which does not respect at least the third economic freedom to exchange “in the money”, for the simple reason - that we will develop later - that it is not universally accessible within an economic zone. Such a “currency” that forces one back to barter where it is not present, cannot have the characteristic of freedom “to exchange in the money”.
And this is why the RTM makes the difference between a specific value and the money as “measure and medium of universal exchange” inside the monetary union.
It is quite the same role that the speed of light plays in Relativist physics. Light is not a physical object like any other objects. Its speed, data of space/time (a distance divided by a time) is the same in any referential. And it is because observers agree on this point, that they deduce the relativity of the other measurements to establish a relativist theory compatible among them, giving different measurements following different frames of reference, but having the “same form”.