Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: An Honest Introduction to Money
by
BobK71
on 18/05/2015, 17:13:06 UTC
In a world where the things we need and use go bad, sharing comes naturally. The hoarder ends up sitting alone atop a pile of stale bread, rusty tools, and spoiled fruit, and no one wants to help him, for he has helped no one. Money today, however, is not like bread, fruit, or indeed any natural object. It is the lone exception to nature’s law of return, the law of life, death, and rebirth, which says that all things ultimately return to their source. Money does not decay over time, but in its abstraction from physicality, it remains changeless or even grows with time, exponentially, thanks to the power of interest.

The purpose of monetary society is to allow individuals the flexibility to earn and consume at different times, and to adjudicate the relative value of each good, service and consumption.  It also makes division of labor possible.  Money is one of the great inventions of humankind.

The vast majority of savers are not hoarders who refused to help others over their lives.  They are ordinary people trying to be able to consume when they become old or sick.  In any case, sharing what you have is a noble impulse that is fundamentally difficult to codify into a system, so it should probably stay as such.

And savers taking advantage of borrowers are not the predominant outcome of debt.  Inflation and default probably happen more often than loans repaid fully with higher-than-justified interest rates.

To be totally honest, you can't be 100% sure, but usually someone making a sweeping philosophical statement about money such as this has the ulterior motive of supporting the financial repression by the elites that makes the modern monetary system possible, that benefits them so much.  And their next device for repression will be negative interest rates, if they get their way.

For this reason, I have become wary of such statements, as I've read so many of them.  When all's said and done, money really shouldn't be considered that different from the simple and mundane object we all understand it to be.  If it really is more complicated, then something is wrong, since the elites will take advantage of the lack of understanding of the rest.  This last part is unfortunately all too true today.  There's nothing that will benefit the average person more, fundamentally, than fixing this anomaly.