In the market, money is a medium which circulates value. With Capitalism, it is the signal being extracted from the noise of the economy and society.
It is a contract, with one side and asset and the other a debt. Basically a receipt, or iou. Yet capitalism assumes it is a store of value.
Blood is a medium. Fat is a store. Roads are a medium. Parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, while the hall closet is a store. Fortunately children can educated to the difference, even if economists cannot.
When we try to store the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated.
This creates 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 finance functions as the value circulation mechanism, this 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 dynamic, but our culture lacks the perspective.
The other primary effect is that government has been manipulated into being debtor of last resort. Where would those trillions of apparently surplus capital go otherwise?Derivatives? Apple stock?
Given much of this gets spent on the military, we are blowing up other countries to create the debt to back the illusion of wealth.
Which might explain why we can have endless, strategically inept wars and no one is held accountable.
What if the government were to threaten to tax out what it currently borrows?
People would have to find other methods of storing value for the future, than their bank accounts.
Given we save for many of the same reasons, raising children, housing, healthcare, retirement, etc, if ways could be found to invest in these directly, as community assets, than everyone trying to save for them individually, we would be storing value in stronger communities and healthier environments, not just using them as resources to be mined of value.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is that the resulting atomized culture is more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system. The networks matter as much as the nodes.
Our reality is not built on rock, but one feedback loops and the positive feedback loop we have been riding for generations is about to turn into a negative feedback loop, as the future we have been borrowing against arrives.
