I don't know that I'm cynical, so much as, having grown up on a farm and framing "the system" in terms of the bigger system, I see it as a downside of a larger dynamic.
Let's just say that modern economics and bacteria operate under the same infinite growth formula. The problem is when they hit the edge of the resources, or the petri dish, it all crashes.
So the advantage of multicellular organisms is being able to sense and navigate the situation.
Government, as executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the nervous system, while money and banking are a form of abstract blood and circulation system.
As cells in this process, people therefore tend to resent the role of government trying to tell them what to do, while worshiping money as the abstraction of all their wishes and needs.
Which has left the banks with all the power.
The only real job the flunkies allowed in office have, is running up the debt the banks need to grow metastatically. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
As these linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate, so Econ 101 describes it as both medium of exchange and store of value.
In your body, blood is medium, while fat, as well as bone and muscle, are store. Would a doctor confuse them?
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over and we would be fighting over the lots.
The medium has become the message. The tool has become the god.
While we might think of it as commodity to mine from the economy, like gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computers, it functions as a social contract. Gold or bitcoin can only serve as money to the degree to which everyone is willing to acknowledge some exchange value, as with money. So the value is in the social contract.
As medium, we own money like we own the section of road we are on, or the air and water flowing through our bodies.
In order to store the asset side of the ledger, there has to be a debt to back it.
The federal debt started to grow with the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital, as well. Then WW2 came along and the military became the golden child.
So here we are now, going out and turning brown people to pink mist, because the only tool the politicians have is the military, so anytime they feel the need to act important, they go play cowboys and Indians on the other side of the planet.
Irrespective of whether it is a wise long term investment.
When they do blow up the dollar, all the air goes out of the bubble and reality sets in.
Trying to save individually, rather than as a function of a larger society, is like going out an buying a pound of hamburger and the butcher tells you it is a cow and it will grow much bigger.
When the price of the stock of the bread company goes up, we feel richer, but when the price of the bread goes up, we feel poorer, so much of the inflation has been directed to the investment side of the economy, but it's still a bubble. It's really just the value of the investment dollar going down.
Think of derivatives as parimutuel wagering. You don't own the horse, it just keeps lots of money floating up in the cloud.
