Scott,

It isn't so much everyone wants to be a millionaire, but that we are all taught money is some commodity we mine from society, when it is the social contract enabling it. It's a medium, but we treat it as the message.

Markets need money to circulate, while people see it as signal to extract and store. Econ 101 says it is both medium of exchange and store of value. Blood is a medium, while fat is a store. They are not synonymous.

As a contract, the asset is backed by the debt, so to store the asset, equal amounts of debt have to be generated. So when we all pull money out of the system, rich and middle class, someone has to be the other side of that obligation, in order to save it. It's like the heart trying to store blood, telling the hands and feet they don't need so much and should work harder for what they do get.

Much of the debt is also government. They fuss about so much spending and debt, but do everything to generate more. Even the military has said they have enough, but more gets poured in.

That's because our financial system needs it to function. The banks need the bonds. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.

The problem is that we would need a serious psychological intervention, to break this paradigm. To see money as we see roads. A public utility we use, but is collectively owned. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not responsible for its value, like a personal check.

Many like to think they have a libertarian, individualistic ethos, but it's largely a fiction, that effectively serves to keep us socially isolated and dependent on public systems to connect us to each other. Rather than develop organic communities built on collective responsibility. Meaning is what we add to the larger society, not what we take from it.

There is an intervention coming though. The mother of all reality checks is in the mail.