Money is cool when it enables the cobbler to trade it for bread instead of the shoes he makes. This way, when the baker doesn't need anymore shoes they still have reason to trade. Money is not cool when 400 people use it to impose their will over 8 billion others.
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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I think that sums up my views on money and capitalism. It's VERY necessary for equality, like your example. With money rather than simply trading goods, the cobbler has the ability to have a full pantry as often as the shopkeep who has more to provide far more frequently. But it's also extremely flawed, and also make inequality really, really easy. The cobbler can only make and sell so many shoes in a period of time, but a general goods shopkeep has lots of things to sell all the time, and he doesn't have to make those goods himself, so he's bound to be wealthier than the cobbler, unless the cobbler raises his prices, at which point fewer common folk would be able to afford his shoes, giving them less options for shoes, and/or less money to spend on other necessities. If only the world could be a little simpler sometimes.
Money makes sense if you look at the history of it. People used to barter, but what if you didn't have what the other person needed? Valuable items were used as an intermediary when trading, like jewellery made of precious metal or just coins of precious metals.
Having a lot of money sitting around isn't safe so it went into a bank vault. The banks gave out slips to show how much money you had and people would trade these paper slips instead of the metal coins.
Eventually though the fractional banking system allowed money to be created from nothing, which meant the paper slips no longer represented precious metal in a vault. So now money doesn't represent anything besides a promise. Personally, I don't know if going back to trading bits of gold and silver really changes anything than trading bits of 0s and 1s.
It doesn't, nor would anyone choose to return to that paradigm. It may be forced upon society by a critical mass event. I think the more likely result, say 500 years in the future, is that no form of money exists. Think Star Trek. I just think there's too many people & not enough work to continue w/ paid labor that allows the idea of money to persist.
I mean you could say the same about anything really. Govt is just a collective agreed upon system. Individual countries are just arbitrary lines drawn that only persist because we gave those lines meaning.
Everything about civilization only has importance because we give it all importance.
Money is a way to prioritize work according to what is most needed and wanted, without having to centralize communications.
Also it makes bartering asynchronous. I can effectively barter peaches for coffee without needing to find someone who needs my peaches and has excess coffee.
It exponentially reduces the improbability of finding working trades. In that way it’s kind of like a catalyst, reducing the activation energy. It’s like a superconductor for economic signals. Or a reaction surface that helps molecules find each other and react.
It's just an iou
Yeah, that's what I was going to say. But it's even better than that. I can trade the IOU from you with someone else. And no one ever has to pay it back directly.
Money is nothing but trust. When that trust is gone, money has no value. Take a look at Zimbabwe.
Money is time. You use your own time to earn money so that you can buy time from others for their goods and services.
So billionaires time worth wayyyyy more than our time ?
He does not work himself. His employees do with their time. And the buyers of his goods (cars, phones…) make him richer with their money (time).
And it's easier than chickens.
If you want an easy and entertaining read on this topic, try Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. Money is fiction, but it's a helpful fiction.
It starts making sense once you try to imagine a world without it. And I mean a functioning world - not a "would be nice" version of it.
I can definitely imagine a functioning world without it. But what you mean is a functioning capitalist world, which yeah, would be impossible without money. That doesn't mean we couldn't have a perfectly functioning post-scarcity world without money, it just wouldn't fit into your narrow idea of what the world should look like.
And that's not an insult to you, it's something most people suffer from. We've done things one way so long, the idea of doing it any other way is so alien to us, we reject it as impossible. But we've done things before that people thought were impossible.
Read the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson.
Man, I'm too baroque to buy any books.
There is probably a pirated version.
money is a form of debt
More of a physical representation of a debt, but in essence, yes.
I buy a rock from you with $5, that $5 represents the debt I incurred by taking the rock. You have the $5 that you can use to barter for something else. At the end of the day, the government is backing my debt for the rock with a physical piece of paper. Except it isn't physical anymore now that everything is digital. So, I suppose its more like the bits of data that represent the physical money that represents the debt for the rock is backed by the government. Although that money is actually physical at the bank that conducted the electronic transaction, and they borrowed that physical money from the fed. But even then, it is inflated since not every dollar a bank transacts with, is backed by something physical since the reserve ratio is not 100%. And that is when it starts becoming confusing.
It's also an asset. Trade it for goods and services.
Money is a slice of the country's economic output.
communist detected