Monica,

There was a time when banking was more organic and local and the sense of it was probably more of the communal voucher system that it is, but lots of old wisdom has been lost to our modern mechanized, mass society. Though I don’t sense it was ever something effectively taught.

There does seem to be a strong sense that money is a commodity, like gold or bitcoin, that can be mined and manufactured. Rather than an accounting device, as a contract between the community and those trading with it, either individual members, or other communities.

Then again, it is the secular god, Mammon. We do have a habit of turning our tools into gods, when our minds have totally formed around them.

Which gets to the fact our culture is built around a religion and remains in its shadow, that conflates the ideal with the absolute and that is probably more of a mortal sin against coherent thought than mistaking a contract for a commodity.

In the long run, though, it is a process of social evolution and we appear to be at a particularly adolescent stage. Government was private once and it took over a century, from the French Revolution to WW1, for the West to shed it.

Though the Covid pandemic appears to be a particularly sharp pin to a very inflated bubble. As the government pours ginormous amounts of money out over the system, the usual suspects will do their best to soak up as much as possible and that will only exacerbate the situation. Even a parasite needs a fairly healthy host. It will get harder to make the argument extreme wealth is a necessary aspect of the economy, when the economy is grinding itself apart. They are not going to put the genie back into the lamp, but it will take awhile for the lines to become clear. Though given they own the government and much of the media, the castle walls will not crumble easily.

The equilibrium has been punctuated.

Cheers,

John