The benefits of money creation should be shared equally with those it rightfully belongs to: the people. Issuing money this way turns money into a neutral lubricant that penetrates every nook and cranny of the economy without distorting the market. A well-designed UBI is a cornerstone of a free and fair market economy that is capable of increasing our collective well-being and positive freedom in untold ways.

The case for a basic income is simple. Whenever we create money, new value comes into existence from thin air. This value competes with the physical use value of the goods and services we create with our labor, our natural resources and the information contained in our culture. People have the right to the fruits of their own labor, but any value created out of nothing should be shared equally by all citizens. This is distributive justice.

The simplest way to share this benefit would be to pay it out as a basic income into every citizen’s account in equal weekly portions. All money should be issued this way and only this way.

Basic income is a peer-to-peer currency citizens grant each other to facilitate trade. The money is granted to all citizens by all citizens who are willing to accept it themselves in exchange for their own labor and the goods and services they sell on the market. By endowing our neighbors with a basic income, they endow it to us in return. Citizens collectively issue this money against the collective productivity of the citizens who use it.

To distinguish this money from all other types of money, let’s give it a name: Virta. This is a Finnish word that appropriately means power, current, flow, stream and river. Since Finnish words are rarely used in other languages, I propose that we derive the nomenclature, or the naming convention, relating to this invention from Finnish.

If we evaluate this proposal using game theory, the payoff matrix will clearly show that on a population-wide basis, a UBI-based monetary system is far superior in its ability to create human well-being than our current debt-based monetary system. Game theory and the mathematical proofs it provides are perhaps the most effective argument against our current monetary system.

Issuing money only as a UBI means that all money enters the economy first to fulfill the basic needs of humanity. This rewires our economy to become a needs-based economy in which the primary task of production is to fulfill basic human needs. Much of the unnecessary production that now eats at our natural resources would hopefully be shifted to these much more necessary purposes.

If we design life as a team sport, the UBI is the equal starting point every player starts with at the beginning of the week. In the game of Monopoly, every player starts the game with the same amount of money. This is what makes it a game worth playing. If some players were given varying amounts of money and others none, nobody would play that game. Any game worth playing starts with equality of opportunity at its beginning. In the team sport we are designing, a new game starts every Monday.

Issuing all money in the form of a UBI creates multiple benefits. When you know that you will get, say, 100 units of Virta every week no matter what, it provides a tremendous sense of security for everybody. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the UBI fills the two bottom, or metabolic, needs: physiological and safety needs. This allows people to focus on fulfilling their immaterial needs: love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization.

When nobody is deprived of their basic necessities, the pain, suffering and constant stress experienced by a large share of the population will simply vanish. Relieving people of this pain will increase the cumulative well-being experienced by the population tremendously. The basic income allows citizens to provide for their basic needs and creates a solid foundation for widespread prosperity.

It is also in every citizen’s interest that all other citizens have money at their disposal. This increase in purchasing power increases the likelihood that every service has a paying customer and that every employee has a financially stable employer. This is how we create a culture of mutual prosperity.

As mechanisms, the UBI and the workshare are designed to work together seamlessly. Since everybody receives a UBI every week, cells don’t have to compensate their participants immediately. Instead of paying them money, they can issue workshares that will pay when the customers pay for the finished good or service. This way workers can own the rightful share of the fruits of their labor since they now share the risk.

If we visualize our money as a valuable liquid that flows through our economy via pipelines, the workshare could be visualized as an empty cup that fits one monetary unit worth of the liquid. Cells can issue as many empty cups to their workers as they want at no cost at the start of the project and then divide the incoming money amongst the cups when the payment is received. This solution dismantles a key impediment to economic activity–the lack of capital.

The genius behind a UBI-based monetary system is that money is predistributed, not redistributed. This means that instead of imposing taxes on people and redistributing money to the needy, all money is predistributed equally to everybody, including the needy, before anything else happens in the economy.

A UBI will not eliminate the need for taxation since we will still need to create public services and infrastructure, but it will lower the need for direct social remittances and thus reduce the tax burden. The best source for taxation is natural resources, but we will discuss that issue in more detail in a later book.

Since money is created in small increments in everybody’s accounts, the whole economy will be built from the grassroots up. Larger projects come about only by pooling small income streams into larger quantities, and most projects will have to incorporate a crowdfunding campaign to accomplish this.

As every undertaking is now dependent on the money provided by individual citizens, every citizen will experience an exhilarating expansion in their own power. In a system like this, the state and the corporations will be directly dependent on the money provided by the citizens, which means that citizens will be treated with more respect than they ever have been before.

Citizens’ consumption choices will make or break the prospective projects that compete for their funding. In the hands of citizens, the basic income will be like the water we pour on the plants we want to see grow. The thorns and weeds–the plants we don’t want–will be deprived of water and wither and die as a result. This way, the projects that are harmful or aren’t worthy of the energy/matter they consume will not receive the vital funding they need to survive.

In an evolutionary sense, citizens become the selectors of which projects should “reproduce” and which should not.

If we issue another set of UBI to pay for public expenses, people will gain the power that politicians now have. They would have the ability to allocate how public funds are used. This would represent a highly empowered form of direct democracy. Delegating these important choices to every citizen will result in much better outcomes and dramatically improve the quality of life on this planet.

UBI is a painless way of ensuring the well-being of our fellow citizens compared with the current system. Since the UBI is given absolutely free, half of it can be used to pay taxes without causing any of the pain associated with being forced to pay income taxes as we do today. By directing half of our power to fund vital public services, we citizens are still left with the other half that we can allocate as we please for our private benefit.

If we had to choose the most painless way to pay for our public services, it must be at the moment money is created out of thin air in our accounts. Whereas income taxes take a share of our hard work and productivity, paying taxes from our UBI is like paying it from a lottery win. Since we didn’t earn the money with our hard work, getting anything at all still feels like a gift.

Money is the information we use to allocate energy/matter in our economy. If you find a pothole on the street, it is one thing to ask your neighbor to fix it and hope that they have the time, the resources and the altruistic disposition to do so. It’s a whole other thing to pay somebody to do the job. When money exchanges hands, things get done. But who in their right mind would spend their own money to fix a problem that should be handled by the municipal government? Only somebody who has been endowed with free money for just such a purpose.

This is why it is so important to distribute the UBI equally to everybody. When half of the UBI is reserved for personal needs and the other half for public spending, every citizen has the capacity to solve problems wherever they encounter them. We can only imagine what a society like this would look like.

When we seek to create collective intelligence, we must understand how to generate the right signals. By creating money only as a UBI, where each citizen gets 100 units for private needs and 100 units for public needs every Monday, the true value of money is crystal clear to everybody. As a measuring unit, the signal money sends will be as clear as any measurement in the metric system. Money also provides another signal: it acts as a direct request or command. Here’s money; please fix that pothole.

Now, this is only the start. To make the currency compatible with the laws of physics and biology and our ecosystem as a whole, we need to design our monetary system further. For one, we have to solve the problem of inflation. You cannot just pour more money into the economy every week and expect the money to retain its value. We also have to design a mechanism that simulates the circular flow that is so essential to an abundant and sustainable economy.