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Stefan_Schubert comments on Private currency to generate funds for effective altruism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Hehe. Well you could call such an actor the government - I don't want to quibble on words since I don't like verbal disputes - but there would certainly be many things that differentiated it from a normal government.
Note that getting currency monopoly would give you two sorts of seignorage. Firstly, you would get seignorage on the way there. People would buy your currency using other currencies, which would give you enormous incomes. At the same time, conventional currencies would lose value, which would mean holders of these currencies would lose immensely. Secondly, once you have monopoly power, printing new money in order to get some small amount of inflation a year (which is seen as desirable according to conventional economic theory) will give you 3,5 % of GDP in seignorage a year according to Kumhof (if I remember correctly).
So certainly this would give you huge incomes, and power. Still, you would not have monopoly on power which is the traditional definition of government, etc.
You would, ultimately, not get paid in other currencies (Monopoly! so other currencies have no value) but in real assets and labor. IE, the issuer would end up owning.. most of the economy in question. The only way that does not get shut down hard is if the currency issuer is de facto the government, regardless of whether they recognize that.
Under Kumhof's scheme, the income substitutes for taxation, so that the percentage of the economy run by the government isn't changed, and should in the long run go down some if I apprehend the system correctly. (No national debt, so no commandeering of resources to pay for that.) It also makes the finance sector of the economy much smaller.
Yes when you have monopoly you can't get paid in other currencies, that is correct. However, it would not end up owning most of the economy, since the point of the plan is to give away the money for charitable purposes (which might not only include money to the poor of course but also other things the effective altruist movement find important).
I don't think that you'd have to be the government for this to work. You'd have to strike a deal with the government, that is true, but you would not have to be the government. You'd be very powerful, that is true, but there have been other organizations which have been very powerful without actually being the government - e.g. labour unions in some countries. Of course, they have had lot of contact with the government - sometimes friendly, like under social democratic governments, sometimes hostile, like under Thatcher.
The power of such "states in the state" is of course upheld by the legal system. Social democratic governments tend to write laws that support the union power, whereas conservative governments write laws that undermine them. See Gunnar's post on how this system would be upheld by the legal system too.
So in order for this system to be accepted, you need political support, for which you in turn, in a democracy, need electoral support. This does not, however, mean that you should form a political party for this cause. Instead I think that a better idea would be to work it out on your own, and let the parties come to you, as it were. That way the distinction between the NGO that takes care of this system and the government would be upheld.