Government was private once. Now banking is having its, “Let them eat cake.” moment.
As the executive and regulatory function of society, government is analogous to the central nervous system, as money and banking is to blood and the circulation system.
Though banking cannot be left to he politicians, or it becomes about political needs, not economic ones. Like the head and heart, they are separate and serve separate functions.
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.
Money largely functions as a contract, with the asset backed by a debt, but we tend to view it as a commodity.
The problem is that markets need money to circulate, while people see it as the signal to extract and store, from the noise of society and the economy. Requiring ever more to be added and ever more metastatic and speculative methods of storing what has been extracted.
One way is to limit the money flowing through the real economy, requiring it to run on debt and draw that saved money back into circulation.
The other primary method is to have the government as debtor of last resort. The capital markets could not function as they do today, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus money. The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
The fact is that there isn’t sufficient private investment potential to hold the amount of savings we desire, but we do save for many of the same reasons, having to do with our wellbeing, much of which is a function of a healthy society, so that if we could save value in the community and the environment, as stores of value and not just resources to be mined, we could go back to the ideal of a public commons, not just this atomized society, that is more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by this parasitic financial system.
Money is an economic lubricant, not a fuel. The problem is not injecting it where necessary, but drawing out the excess, since we view it as a commodity and personal property, not a contract between the community and the individual, basically a glorified voucher system.
Logically the governemnt could tax out what it currently borrows, but the power is obviously on the other side of that chain now.
The functionality of money is in its fungibility, so we own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies. It is a public utility and needs to be treated as such.
This isn’t socialism, as society needs both public and private functions, like a house has family and personal spaces. The problem is sorting out what works where.
