Muck Minute #16

Is Money the Root of all Evil??

There was an opinion once stated on TBP about “Money being the root of all evil.” and all that crap. Here are a few musings on the matter.

Actually, money is a very useful invention and when used honestly enables great and rapid human strides from a barter civilization to a highly productive and efficient way of life that benefits everyone who take s advantage of it.  Sadly, in now lies at the mushy base of our “barely is” and “slowly shrinking” prosperity. The bad part of “money” is the human tendency to ruin it, fouling its’ own nest in the progress, which we are doing in so many and varied ways from printing fiat money, instruments of debt, derivatives and spending it first. Milton Friedman’s Rule #1:  spend fiat first to get the most out of it! Overtime, it changes hands, it is diluted further and further eventually being worth a net ZERO. then we continue by polluting any and everything we touch with oil, waste heat or  heat/CO2, nuclear wastes, non-recyclable garbage, too many humans in too small a space (and yes, their wastes foul up the works too – just come to Florida and peer into the green algae polluted springs that were – only 4 decades ago – crystal clear.  Excess irrigation is so wide spread and done so fast that within the lifetimes of our great grand children, farmers’ wells in the corn, wheat belts and veggie growing areas of California will be dry, dry, dry. Maybe whatever the “money” may be then will be sufficient to pipe in water from Canada. Or perhaps things will be warm enough by then to do the farming in Canada, who knows..

The human animal is just a remarkably shrewd, not very smart, upright ape with extremely selfish tendencies. Of course, there are exceptions to the “not so smart” part but, in all, as a race, our IQ’s have been dropping for 6,000 years. And the process is speeding up. There are excellent and clear explanations for this loss of general racial IQ but that is another Muck’s Minute for another day.

 

The end result then produces an entire world wide population of beings who, in general, only think of today – maybe tonight as well – especially if sex is involved — but rarely any farther. The short term, instant gratification mode is glaringly present in all aspects of current human behavior from shoplifting to politics to excessive extraction of natural resources to walking into traffic while sending a text message to an equally stupid recipient.

Tweet or die!  Permanent entertainment or disaster! What ever can a person do by himself without constant entertainment (or what passes for it these days) or being in absolutely constant connect with everyone on the face of the earth.  Entertainment, not production, is King of the Hill and instead of a nation of savers, capital builders, producers, inventors and creators we have – with the full backing of the Banks, Fed, TPTB and other greedy short thinkers of the top 5% – turned ourselves in a Nation of (gag!)c-o-n-s- u-m-e-r-s whose only job is to take Government handouts generated by the Ponzi selling of Treasury Debt to banks who redeposit the money in the U.S. Treasury and collect risk free (they think – ah! Are they in for  surprise!) interest to assist them to stay in the top 5% while all those “consumers” fight over Black Friday scraps of worthless Chinese crap or the latest thing in Indonesian perfume.  The more the better, get it while you can and consider yourself “prosperous” — only being prosperous has nothing to do with possessions or Chinese junk and is, instead, measured in personal satisfaction of achievement, love of family, closeness of family and friends and the ability to – every day – be amazed and glory in Natures’ infinite beauty and wonder.

That’s why our current societal/political construct of “kick the can” or “paint it over” or “just forget about, someone else later will figure out a fix” is universally preferred to really fixing anything when it’s gone wrong.

Paint over it, move it over, rearrange the chairs, weld that broken strut (poorly), just fill it with putty and so on and so on.

But “money” is not the cause of all this present and coming agony. We are the cause of it. Now how is that?

As far back as the  elections of the early 1970’s should have plainly written in the sky in all CAPS for everyone to see that cares to look up from their video game is that some 200 years ago a thrifty Scottish fellow by the name of Alexander Fraser Tytler, had a startling insight into the nature of short term human thinking, so well proved out today. Right now, in fact.. It goes as follows:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by anarchy, moving to a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”  With several Wars along the way to add punctuation marks to the fun!

I’m not so sure about the “monarchy” conclusion reached at the end – but a dictatorship or fascist form of government is obviously the most likely as civil order finally implodes when the Free Shit stops — as it mathematically must at some point when lack of resources, technology and productivity fail to keep us even with the “Take from the productive and give to the non-productive” proclivity that exists in broad reaches of the world today – especially in the USA and the EU.

Another fellow – a bit later in time – Alexis de Tocqueville by name, had a slightly different view of corruption via political pollution of money:

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the publics’ money”.

And then we have Will Rodgers who summed it all up, “A fool and his money are soon elected.”

Ending with Margaret Thatcher, ”The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money [to spend].”

Put them all together and you have been provided sufficient insight into the simple fact that money is not the root of all evil but that man is; root, trunk and branch; through his actions, the functions of money are distorted and once distortion (i.e. fiat inflation of any ilk) has gained a foothold, eventual debasement and collapse of said fiat money are inevitable.

Please remember: unbacked credit and money created out of thin air are exactly the same thing and the collapse of the debt it “finances” which indeed will happen simply when the confidence of those people, wherever and whomever they are, who accept the fiat money/credit in exchange for real property, goods and services fails and people refuse to buy into the Ponzi Scheme anymore..

When the people and producers, in their inimitable fashion, lose confidence in the fiat credit/money to purchase real goods and services in an orderly fashion, the immediate response is to try and find something else to use for money – in a black market..

Gresham’s Law (well proven) states, “Bad money drives out good money.” and makes the good money vanish from view into the black market where some great bargains can be had. But you must be careful the Government doesn’t catch you because by then, the Government has closed banks, installed draconian currency controls, confiscatory taxes and other robber baron methods to fleece businesses, the sheeple and outlaw anything but their own fiat garbage as a medium of exchange!.. You take their worthless money at the point of a gun or be mightily punished for not doing so. Be advised that this is the true path into penury and has happened throughout history time and time again.  And is happening as I write this as J.P. Morgan Chase will no longer accept Federal Reserve Notes (i.e. cash) in deposit to a third party Bank Account!!!  Honest..  Go try it. 

History is exceptionally cruel in this respect in that when debasement of money, fiat and unbacked “fantasy credit” is issued that will never be repaid begins to happen, there is absolutely no historical incidence or record of it ever ending except in disaster. NEVER.

It always collapses just like any other Ponzi scheme, even when done on a worldwide multinational basis. We are watching the twisting and turning of Central Banks and Governments world wide trying frantically to get out of debt by going deeper into debt, papering over default by selling themselves bonds they printed themselves and all other varieties of kinky fiscal idiocy that will eventually blow away in the wind, leaving all concerned dead and dying at the end of the rope they strung for themselves to hang by.

I must admit that as I write this, the Greek Government is in final negotiations with the EU, Germany and the IMF so that the EU/IMF will release 1.3 Billion Euros to Greece so Greece can use the money to make an interest only payment on an upcoming loan ” repayment” payment to the EU and IMF..  Laugh my ass off.  Who the holy hell to they think they are fooling?

This fiscal exercise in futility is then followed fairly rapidly by a general lowering of living standards, a die off of significant proportions of those elderly and other who “fall off the bottom of the fiscal ladder” and, in a burst of glory, the fabled Man on The White Horse barges in (with his loyal troops) to the “rescue” and we all find ourselves living under martial law at a much, much lower living standard and with a Military fascist promising to liberate us from our own folly. Same old, same old. This has played out time after time down the tortuous trail of history and our situation will be no different this time either.

The bitch is in the timing. My comment on a thread elsewhere about it being a long and agonizing scream of misery followed by a “Bang” applies.

In the l-o-n-g run, if anyone is interested in it, we are totally screwed as a race – humanity that is, not some subset of it – and money has nothing to do with it. We, however, are smarter than the dinosaurs and other “less intelligent” species that have vanished before us through accident, cosmic indifference or climate change. We are currently engineering our own extinction which will have the exact same effect as enjoyed by all those species preceding us to extinction. We, in our particularly twisted ways, are hurrying other lesser species to extinction every day as we continue to rape and pillage various environments for greater “economic” glory.

Think about this: 98% of all documented species that ever dwelled on the planet are now extinct.  What makes anyone think we’re “too special” to trot right along after the other 98%, especially since we are destroying our own ecosystem?

There isn’t a chance in Hell that the human race, in all its’ glory, varied self-centered goals, wants and perceived “needs” will be willing as a world wide group to agree on anything, much less coordinated action to prevent or mitigate what is roaring down the pike toward us all. Which is a planet 2-6 degrees Celsius hotter than today (already 1.5 degrees C above that prior to the 1850’s) with all the misery that will cause from draughts, extreme hurricanes, violent monsoons and a huge rise in ocean levels that will flood a billion people from their homes and cities. But that’s day after tomorrow and of no interest to the teeming masses of sheeple that cannot even understand it, much less bring any pressure on ruling bodies to arrest the trend..

But “money” is not to be blamed for any of it.

Pile on top of that pretty picture is one of us trying to handle it as it comes using Medieval social organizations, barter and religious pogroms from every side.  Throw in a few hundred nukes to cook it all down and that’s our future – medium term.

Our own distortion, misuse,  stupid use of so many things in Nature, both the human sort and that belonging to Mother’s Nature is to blame for every bit of it and as Pogo said, “We have found the enemy and he is us!”.

End

Author: MuckAbout

Retired Engineer and Scientist (electronic, optics, mechanical) lives in a pleasant retirement community in Central Florida. He is interested in almost everything and comments on most of it. A pragmatic libertarian at heart he welcomes comments on all that he writes.

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Llpoh
Llpoh

Thanks Muck! This stuff makes my head hurt. The only thing I know about money is that more is better ethan than less of it.

I look forward to your IQ treatise.

Dick Jones
Dick Jones

Since human beings were conquering, enslaving, and killing each other well before the invention of money – anywhere from ~2,000 to 8,000 years ago, depending upon specific definition – it’s obvious that there is something else – and not money – that is the “root of all evil.”

Like Muck says, money is just an invention, a tool, an inanimate object. Much like a loaded gun, if I happen to leave some money on a table, and no human ever comes into contact with it, that money won’t spontaneously commit evil by itself.

Like Muck says, money just makes trading more efficient. I think we would all admit that exchanging money for meat and bread and sneakers is much better than having to barter directly with the butcher, the baker, and the shoe maker. I think we would all admit that getting paid our salaries in money is much better than receiving to bushels of corn or barrels of salt (in fact, the word “salary” itself comes from the days in the Roman Empire when soldiers would be paid in salt allowances).

Unfortunately, it cuts both ways. Money also makes doing evil more efficient. People who do evil can directly measure the success of their evil by the bulging digits in their accounts. But this does not make money the root of evil. There is something much deeper in the human condition that causes a person to do evil to his fellow man.

Stephanie Shepard

One of the reasons I’ve been working with cryptocurrencies is because of the need for separation of money and state. Hundreds of years ago the idea of separation of church and state and freedom of religion was radical and heresy.

While I don’t know if cryptocurrencies are the answers I do know I want options. I want to be able to have fiat money (best purpose is lines of credit), precious metals, cash, cryptocurrencies etc. The monopoly on money is the biggest problem of the global and domestic economy.

suzanna

@/for: MuckAbout,

That was painful to read. I have a problem w/ the globule warming

cap and trade/tax schema. I can not believe the pollution we create

is causing warming. It is possible that the # of people, heating units

of all varieties, and the general bustling about could be contributing.

Ever been in a chilly room after it fills with people?

One thing is for sure!! The pollution factor, the indiscriminate dumping

of garbage and refuse (and spent nuke rods stashed hither and yon) and

chemicals dumped into soil and water are destroying eco systems everywhere.

Clear cutting forests, lopping off mountain tops, digging up miles of soil and

rock then walking away, dumping garbage into the oceans constantly, drilling

for oil and covering spills with toxic corexit…oh my, that is maybe the worst of

it. The Japanese nuke power plant were also nuke weapon manufacturing plants.

Now they are spewing into the ocean. The weather? We are being sprayed with toxins

everyday, and to what end? So NASA and the US Navy can “own the weather” by 2025?

What else are they doing? These are all forms of poisoning and polluting the earth.

They are the biggest reason we are experiencing die offs. I planted bee and butterfly

friendly plants last spring, but only saw them occasionally. I would guess the WIFI

everything and glyphosate are contributing a deadly influence as well. As we proxy

war with Russia we are playing with fire. If nukes start going off, well, indeed we will

go extinct as well. Perhaps I have no question of you after all.

suzanna

Plus, we are running out of water, are we? Then it will be truly ugly

at the end.

javelin
javelin

The biblical quote/reference you attempted to use is actually, “The LOVE of money is the root of all evil”…small nuance but COMPLETELY changes the entire context and meaning when the exact quote is used ( like much biblical referencing which is done)

kokoda
kokoda

“…to prevent or mitigate what is roaring down the pike toward us all. Which is a planet 2-6 degrees Celsius hotter than today (already 1.5 degrees C above that prior to the 1850’s) with all the misery that will cause from draughts, extreme hurricanes, violent monsoons and a huge rise in ocean levels that will flood a billion people from their homes and cities. But that’s day after tomorrow and of no interest to the teeming masses of sheeple that cannot even understand it, much less bring any pressure on ruling bodies to arrest the trend.”

Muck…most of your writing was valid , especially when related to historical precedent. However, the para quoted above shows that you are a gullible fool. Too bad.

Stephanie Shepard

MuckAbout: There’s a lot of good things about crypto-currencies. Necessity is the mother of all invention. Crypto-currencies are the first currencies designed specifically for the internet and e-commerce. There’s plenty of alternative crypto-currencies outside of Bitcoin all designed for different purposes. In history there’s been numerous types of currencies that weren’t back by an underlying asset such as tally sticks or even seashells. Money is a lot more complex these days.

Stephanie Shepard

MuckAbout: It’s not a simple answer when it comes to crypto-currencies. There’s two ways to acquire Bitcoin (as an example) one is through “mining” of blocks which are transactions. People can use their computers in a pool with other people for their computers to solve the transaction algorithms. The second way is to buy them with fiat money from around the world in a pseudo transfer of wealth.

Stephanie Shepard

I should note: The underlying value of mining Bitcoin is the electricity and equipment used to do the transactions.

A Bitcoin Mining Farm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95JfYFIRPZU

Fiatman60
Fiatman60

@Stephanie @Muck About

What Stephanie said is true…… at the moment……. but will change very fast once the crypto becomes mainstream….
All governments want control of their currencies, ALWAYS! It’s the only way to control other governments and the sheeple. Crypto currencies are by design, fiat in nature, with one exception…
They are global, within the internet, and therefore not controlled by governments. And that’s the rub.
Sooner than later, your local government will step in and ban the crypto currency claiming it to be a safe haven for terror-ists (or whatever excuse fits the flavor of the day), so that they FORCE the sheeple to use the government supplied currency, which they can manipulate, and tax as they see fit. It’s called sovereignty!!
Governments cannot tax or manipulate a cryptic currency, even if they had the keys.

As for PM’s (precious metals), they don’t want them either, because as they stealth inflate, so does too the PM’s. Everyone would see the effects immediately after inflation, and everyone would be on to their evil game of the “first in line gets to spend the newly inflated dollars before prices go up” scenario. Newly created currency always goes to the bankers first…. ALWAYS!!

Fiat is just a promise to pay tomorrow, at the expense of our children today. So sad that ordinary people just can’t see it……….

IndenturedServant

Humans are the root of all evil. Eliminate humans and evil goes away.

Money is just a tool just like guns. Tools can be used for good or evil but only in the hands of humans.

OutLookingIn
OutLookingIn

REAL money is physical gold.

ALL the remaining that purport to be “money” are just currency.

Driving down the price of physical gold by using paper currency based gold –
Does not drive down it’s value.
Quite the opposite happens – It’s value increases, however then goes into hiding.

Gresham’s Law at work.

Gold is just a tool. Like all tools it can be used for good or evil. Nuff said.

IndenturedServant

I posted my response after reading the first question. It seems great minds think alike!

acjitsu
acjitsu

@Stephanie: So, suppose the power grid goes down. How exactly will those cryptocurrencies work?

kokoda
kokoda

Muck….you should learn a little about SCIENCE – it is never settled !!!!! As just one modern example: Newton’s Law of Gravity was amended by Einstein.

BTW – tell us how the science is settled, in terms of science. If you can’t, then that proves you are a gullible fool.

Stephanie Shepard

Ac_Jitsu: The same thing that happens to the money in your bank account or your credit cards. Dumbass.

IndenturedServant

Clammy said:
“The monopoly on money is the biggest problem of the global and domestic economy.”

We make be talking about the same thing but the ability to print money out of thin air is the biggest problem. There are no limits.

The presumable advantage of cryptocurrencies is the limited ability to create them. The thing I don’t like about them is that it appears that people have the ability to disappear them (Mt. Gox anyone?) It seems that even govts have the ability to seize them. Because of this they are no improvement on the fiat we currently have. There may be advantages to use on the innerwebz but I’m not a huge fan of doing business that way. It plays into the hands of the “One Worlder’s” and Globalists which I am against. I prefer to keep my money out of the hands of the big corporations by spending it locally with locally owned businesses. The requirement of electricity and access to a computer connected to a very specific network is another non-starter for me.

suzanna

for MA,
20″ of your time

https://youtu.be/NPgRv27lyu4

IndenturedServant

Clammy says:
“The same thing that happens to the money in your bank account or your credit cards.”

I’m less worried about grid down than I am about bank holiday’s and that’s the reason I don’t keep money in the bank beyond what is required to pay outstanding checks drawn against it. Ten years ago I had no such concerns. (even in hindsight) For years I’ve subscribed to the policy of never loaning out more money to anyone than I could afford to lose and once loaned, I simply consider it a gift in my own mind until it’s paid back. In today’s economic environment you have to take the same attitude with bank accounts especially since the banks have taken the trouble to put pen to paper declaring depositors to be “unsecured creditors with the lowest priority of payback”. I took that as a warning……….literally.

Credit cards? You NEVER use a credit card unless you have the cash in hand to pay off the balance in full unless you enjoy slavery.

Bea Lever
Bea Lever

Hunter gatherers didn’t need money. They hunted/gathered/made what they need, but it is true that they had hundreds of square miles to roam for their own particular use before we paved it and put up a parking lot. We also killed them off and locked away the rest. The hunter gatherer also bartered with outside people for what they needed. Barter is a good substitute for money.

Is money evil ? Not always, but it can be. It is if you are buying/selling baby parts. 🙁

Francis Marion

Muck writes:

“Maybe whatever the “money” may be then will be sufficient to pipe in water from Canada.”

We have lots of water. And you can’t have it.

“Or perhaps things will be warm enough by then to do the farming in Canada, who knows..”

Are you trying to egg me on or is this a joke??

Olga
Olga

IMO – Science is rarely – if ever – settled.

IMO – GREED and FEAR corrupts any monetary system – and that GREED and FEAR is encouraged and manipulated by the psychopaths seeking POWER.

IMO – how to deal with those that desire POWER rather than RESILIENCE might be a more fruitful conversation.

I think it was Catherin Austin Fitts that recently mentioned that America has 3100 counties and 50% of us have been HERDED into +/- 150 of them. I am one of the herded – my rust-belt, rural Michigan home town – a county seat – is dying. It is going the way of Detroit.

And yet it was only settled around 1850 – parceled out from the Public Land Survey and sold to folks wanting to make a go of it. The farm land is/was as black as night – but now all it’s all GMO corn and soybeans with a few orchards here and there.

If it can’t be done from the back of a tractor then screw it – the large canning gardens of the farms of my youth are pretty much toast – they go buy their GMO shit at Wal-Mart and watch as much TV as the rest of the nation.

From the architecture left over it apparently was a pretty prosperous place for a good, long while and other than the initial “asset stripping” of the lumber it was manufacturing and farming – i.e., production – something that has become verboten.

And now, rather than 80% owner occupied it’s now 60% rental – and renting to folks on some form of the dole.

And just when exactly did anti-intellectualism become a badge of pride? People are actually proud of not reading books.

So my plan – in an extremely rudimentary state – is to cash-out and move back to one of these dying towns, buy a cheap-ass place with +/- an acre from the desperate heirs, slap some solar panels on the roof, set out a few rain barrels, develop a permaculture garden and then exist. Paint watercolors, read, knit, sew and garden – and figure out how to pay the property tax.

Hey, a girl can dream.

IndenturedServant

Evil is simply a human construct imposed upon us by our overlords. Picture two clans of cave dwellers battling each other of territory. There’s nothing evil about it. It’s simply survival. It’s no different than animals and animals aren’t evil. They also imposed the idea that we are somehow better than animals but evidence says otherwise. We have the ability to be better but no desire.

Now picture our non-productive overlords in their ivory towers laughing and celebrating as the world currently burns just so they can be a bit richer. That is fucking evil and if we still had the instinct and morals…………yes, MORALS to kill the evil bastards, we wouldn’t be in this mess today.

Every instinct and natural circumstance that might have limited this evil driven, human plague has been removed by the overlords for their own benefit.

Bumper sticker on my workbench:
Some people are alive simply because it’s illegal to kill them.

mike in ga
mike in ga

Olga – Kudos, go for it! I love growing heirloom tomatoes and other vegetables in my garden. Love the canned tomatoes in January and February when you open the jar and the scent is like July when they were picked. I’d like to figure out how to do it on a larger scale but it is hard work. A labor of love, for sure, but labor nonetheless.

EL Caballo
EL Caballo

Whatever means of trade you might use, a shoe, wooden stick or beads, there is always somebody willing to counterfeit that coinage. Lawbreakers ruin the system for everybody although in the beginning there appears to be an advantage to the expansion of the currency, more people working, wider availability of goods and services, the free lunch becomes possible. Production falls by the wayside as a slow means of acquiring wealth, trade and money lending become the tail wagging the dog. Until the system collapses under the weight of debt that can’t be repaid by now despised and worthless scrip.

Nardo
Nardo

The definitive statement on the meaning of money was written by Ayn Rand in “Atlas Shrugged” in 1954. If you haven’t read the book, all 1100+ pages, you’re missing a real education on economics, money, and men. Here is what she said:

“So you think money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the tool of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is that what you consider evil?”

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort.”

“Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent but by compulsion, when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing, when you see that money is flowing to those who get richer by graft and by pull rather than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them but protect them against you, when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed.”

acjitsu
acjitsu

Stephanie, who said anything about money in a bank ? Only morons like yourself would trust them. If you can’t hold it or touch it, it isn’t real money just digits on a screen.

Stephanie Shepard

AC: Anything happens to the power grid on a mass scale I don’t anybody will give a flying fuck about their Bitcoins. Our entire way of life is dependent on the power grid being operational. We’ll have greater problems than I can get my Bitcoins or I can’t get my money out of the bank. The suffering of such a disaster of the power grid going down makes your comment down right ignorant.

Kill Bill
Kill Bill

I believe the actual saying was, “The LOVE of money is the root of all evil.”

Money is not evil. Greed is.

Chubby Bubbles
Chubby Bubbles

There are so many mixed-up ideas in this post and in the comments that it is hard to know where to begin.

“Is Money the Root of All Evil”?
No. Money doesn’t generally create things like pedophilia, for instance.

But in terms of human society, yes, money is pretty much The Root Evil, and here’s why:

Money is a claim on future wealth. Being a claim on future wealth, it pulls future consumption into the present, guaranteeing the eating of the seed corn.

Think of situations you regard as crazy or unsustainable, and you will always find money at the root.

Without “money”, would people dig oil out of the ground, work in nasty factories to create plastics, then put local water in the plastic bottles, pay to maintain roadz and truckz and all the nastiness that goes with them, in order to sell bottled water from Point A to “consumers” at Point B? And then the people at Point B bottle their water and ship it to “consumers” at Point A? And we all clap and say “yay! GDP!” IF there weren’t “money” involved, this would rightly be viewed as “insanity”. But since “money” is involved, we simply call it “business” (BUSY-ness) and regard it as normal, right, proper, and American as apple pie.

Who would build nukes if it weren’t for “money”?

Who would spend hours on a freeway to go work in a cube, if not for “money”?

Who would staff call centers selling sketchy medical services to seniors if it weren’t for “money”?

Who would make GMOs, patent human genes, churn out vast quantities of toxic chemicals, if it weren’t for “money”?

I could go on and on and on…

Gross Domestic “Product”, measured in money terms, is more correctly Gross Domestic WASTE. Humans and the planet would be better off without 95% of what we are led to desire because it is shown to us solely in “money” terms. I think you all know this is true, even though I fully expect this comment to be disliked among the few who may still be paying attention to this post. [I bet a lot of you have read “Your Money or Your Life”.. just go from there and see where it leads.]


I’m not saying that the end of money would mean the end of violence, wars, or resource grabs.. just that money is an eternal accelerant of what might be otherwise natural processes. Money is a Technology that guarantees.. GUARANTEES.. we will eat our seed corn faster, burn the planet sooner, poison stuff quicker, break down those energy gradients with a speed never seen before.

This is the mathematical and intrinsic property of the abstract concept we have fetishized into existence. Its leverage is undeniable, and its “power” (the power we lend it) corrodes and destroys any social system.. right/left, capitalist or socialist/communist, as we have seen. Only a re-dimensioning of society such that money is no longer needed would have the capacity to allow us to regain human well-being (note, I said “capacity”, not surety). It would be a necessary (but not sufficient) transition to a resilient society. In the Middle Ages, for example, most people didn’t even see or use money.

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