For one thing, money is not a fiction, it is a contract, largely between the individual and the community, where the asset is backed by a debt.
The problem is that as these mobile organisms with a sequential process of perception and a narrative based culture, we are linear and goal oriented, while nature is cyclical, reciprocal and feedback generated.
Consequently markets need money to circulate, while we see it as the signal to extract and store, requiring ever more to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted. Which means the debt has to be created, to back the stored asset.
One way is squeezing the money flowing through the general economy, requiring it to run on debt and drawing that saved money back into circulation.
Which sets up a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of the community, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges.
Since money and banking are the value circulation mechanism of society, analogous to blood and the circulation system of the body, the effect is like the heart telling the hands and feet they don't need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get. The Ancients used debt jubilees to reset this, but modern society has avoided that, through wars, colonialism and industrialization.
Another method is having the government as debtor of last resort. It should be pretty obvious that the capital markets couldn't function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus money, but that has been effectively swept under the rug.
The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth. Which explains why we can have endless, strategically inept wars and no one is court marshaled and shot, if their real function is to spend the money, in order that more can be borrowed.
The functionality of money is its fungibility, so we own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water passing through our bodies. It is a public utility and needs to be treated as such.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, but a medium is dynamic while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. If the average five year old can figure out the difference, why are economists that dumb? Or is this blindness just a necessary function of their employment?
The reality is that money is a glorified voucher system and it does the system issuing them no good, if they are being hoarded. So what if the government was to tax out what it currently borrows?
People would quickly start finding other ways to store value.
The problem is there is obviously not enough productive investments to put all the money we feel we must have to good use, but we do save for many of the same reasons, from raising children and housing, to healthcare and retirement, that if ways could re-developed to see these as communal functions, rather than this atomized society, with everyone in their cocoons and their bank account as their economic umbilical cord, than we would have healthier societies and the environments required, as stores of value and not just resources to be plundered.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is an atomized society that is more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system. The networks matter as much as the nodes.
The future we have been borrowing against has arrived. Either we recognize and evaluate the processes at work, or those sitting on the largest piles of public debt will use their considerable influence to trade them for the keys to the kingdom and we get real oligarchy, not just this behind the curtain variety. Disaster capitalism/predatory lending coming home to roost.
