Patching the system doesn’t address its primal flaw. Money is the social contract that enables mass societies to function, not a commodity to mine from society.
Econ 101 teaches us that money is both medium of exchange and store of value. In the body, blood is the medium and fat is the store. For cars, roads are the medium and parking lots are the store. Your hallway is a medium and the hall closet is a store. Economists are idiots.
As a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt, increasing the supply of money requires increasing obligations. It is an accounting device. Even if it is backed by some commodity, like gold, or oil, it just means the obligation is denominated in that commodity.
When society was small, economics was organically reciprocal, but as they grew, accounting became necessary, so money is an account of one’s contributions. Basically a grand voucher system.
Yet as society became much larger, this reciprocal flow is lost in the details and we individually experience money as quantified hope, rather than promises from the whole community. So we try to save and store it. Necessitating ever more to be added, in order to keep the system functioning.
Now we are to the point of trying to drain any and all actual value out of society and the environment, to store as abstractions in the financial system. One way this is done is for the government to borrow enormous amounts of apparently excess money back out of the system. Ask yourself where that 20 trillion, by the federal government alone, would have gone otherwise? Buying up Apple stock? Derivatives?
Then the government has to spend this in ways which don’t compete with the private sector’s profit motives, such as on welfare and warfare.
Not to knock social benefits, but they only patch a broken society, not fix what is broken. Further breaking the connection between rights and responsibilities necessary for a heathy society, that also validates elite predation and parasitism. As for warfare, we are sustaining the illusion of stored value by blowing up the occasional country with it. Neither are viable long term investments.
As the executive and regulatory function of society, from tribal chieftains and elders, to kings and courts, to presidents and legislatures, government is the central nervous system of society. While finance, as the value circulation mechanism, is equivalent to the heart and arteries.
When monarchs grew so powerful that they lost sight of the fact that they served a function to society, in order to be served by it, they were inevitably overthrown. Finance is now in the position of losing sight of this reciprocity. It’s like the heart telling the hands and feet they don’t need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.
It is not that banking should be a direct function of government either, as politicians live and die on the hope they inspire, so printing more money is a cheap high, but both serve the entire community. Now banking mostly serves the desires of the rich, not productively clarifying their limits.
The head and heart serve distinct functions and occasionally logic and desire need to disagree.
Trying to tax the rich a little more is just a surface patch to a flawed paradigm.
