Life isn’t fair. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree. The real cancer in the system is that money functions as a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt, but we treat it as a commodity, to mine/manufacture and store.

When society was small, economics was reciprocal, as it was more efficient to share than hoard, but as they grew, accounting became necessary and that’s what money is, an accounting device. Yet we experience it as quantified hope and try to save it. Since that pulls it from circulation, more is added to keep the system working, even if the assets are just community obligations.

Necessarily to create and store the asset, we need to create equal amounts of debt and it is that debt which sucks the life out of an economy.

Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value. How does that work? In the body, blood is the medium and fat is the store. For cars, roads are the medium and parking lots are the store. One is dynamic and the other stable. Mix them up and the system ceases to function.

One way to store excess money is for the government to borrow it up and spend in ways which facilitate the private sector, but don’t compete with it for profits. We will find though, that those treasuries are eventually worthless. There isn’t much return on paying people who don’t add much, or blowing up the occasional irritating country.

Where would that 20 trillion have gone, otherwise? Derivatives? Apple stock?

Eventually those with the largest piles of bonds will trade them for the remaining public assets and we will find what true oligarchy is. It’s called predatory lending and it has gone on since the dawn of finance.

The fact is that money is not private property, so much as it is a public utility. Like roads. It’s functionality is in its fungibility and we own it like we own the section of road we are on.

If the government were to treaten to tax, what it currently borrows, after the screeching subsides, people will start to store value in more tangible assets, like stonger communities and healthier environments.

We all save for many of the same reasons, children, housing, health, retirement, etc. If we invested in these as communal assets and not everyone trying to save for them individually, with our bank accounts as our economic umbilical cords, economics would go back to being more reciprocal and possibly we wouldn’t be trashing the planet quite so quickly.

Just a thought, as the old cracks open and the new hatches.