I think you could step back a bit further, in terms of the relationship between human linear, goal oriented behavior and the larger cyclical, reciprocal, feedback generated reality in which it occurs. This is implicit throughout your essay, so it might be worth considering it explicitly.
For example, the difference between markets and capitalism is that markets need money to circulate, while people tend to see it as signal to extract and store. The medium has become the message.
Money functions as a distributed social contract and accounting device, which enables mass societies to function, but individually people experience it as quantified hope and treat it as a commodity to mine from society. Consequently ever more has to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted are required.
Given that it is a contract, where the asset is backed by some form of obligation, storing the asset requires generating sufficient debt. Even gold back currencies are only the reciept and require presumably sufficient amounts of gold to back them.
One way is squeezing the flow of money through the general economy, requiring it to run on that much more debt and drawing the saved money back into circulation. The result is a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges.
Given money and banking function as the value cirulation process throughout society, this is analogous to 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 dynamic. In his recent book, Forgive Them Their Debts, Michael Hudson makes the point this naturally sets up a conflict with the system of government, because its function is to sustain the whole society as a healthy unit. Thus instigating debt jubilees.
Which goes to the point that as the executive and regulatory function of society, government is analogous to the central nervous system. So it goes to that inherent biological tension between desire and judgement.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, though 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.
One other method of creating sufficient debt is having the government as debtor of last resort. The elephant in the room is that the capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus investment money.
The US federal deficit really started with the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital as well. Then WW2 channeled this spending to the military there was no stopping it. Consider that of all the trillions the US has spent on its military and other than the Gulf War, in 91, as well as outspending the Soviets, the result has been one long string of epic failures, including continuing to prepare for war with the Soviets. Has there ever been a period of such monumental military ineptitude, where those responsible were not removed and punished? Yet the same group of clowns remain in charge. Could it be there are deeper reasons, such that these misadventures and boondoggles are actually just a burn pit and form of public works project, to create the debt Wall Street needs?
It seems the secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
The functionality of money is its fungibility. 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 quintessential public utility. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not personally responsible for its value, as though we wrote a check.
It is a public utility and has to be understood as such.
There simply isn't the investment potential to save the amounts necessary, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so the premise of the commons will eventually have to be resurrected and updated. This isn't socialism, as there should be both personal and public proerties and functions, but is a matter of recognizing which is which.
We need to respect money more and desire it less.
There was a time when government was private, but as monarchs lost sight of their function to society, they were usurped. Now banking is having its own, "Let them eat cake." moment.
The irony of our individualist ethos is the resulting atomized society is more easily controlled by institutional forces and mediated by a parasitic financial system. Networks matter as much as the nodes inhabiting them.
