It does seem a civil war is being fomented, to forestall a revolution.
Capitalism and a market based economy are not the same thing.
Nature and markets are cyclical and circular, while people are linear and goal oriented, so while markets need money to circulate, people 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.
The problem is that money is a contract, where the asset is backed by a debt. Even gold backed currencies are only the reciept, not the gold.
Which means this religion of accumulating money is built on a debt based economy and culture.
One way is squeezing money flowing through the regular economy, requiring it to run on debt and drawing the saved money back into circulation.
This creates a centripetal effect, as the asset is pulled to the center, while the debt is pushed to the edges. Since money and banking are the social analogy of blood and the circulation system, 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 the modern economy is much larger, taking longer to reach the breaking point.
The other main method is having the government as debtor of last resort. The capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus investment money. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, yet 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. The average five year old understands the difference and eventually even the economists will figure it out. After the entire system comes crashing down, of course.
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 public utility and needs to be treated as such.
It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not individually responsible for sustaining its value.
The fact is that there is not the investment potential to save the amounts we feel necessary, but we do save for many of the same reasons. So the concept of the commons, will have to be resurrected. Stronger communities and healthier environments as stores of value and not just resources to be mined.
This isn't socialism, as societies need both private and public assets, like a house has personal and family spaces. The question is figuring out what works best. Trial and error.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is that the resulting atomized culture is more eaily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system. Networks, organic, social, economic, matter as much as the nodes inhabiting them.
There was a time when government was private, but as monarchs lost sight of the function they served, they were usurped. Banking is currently having its own, "Let them eat cake." moment.
