The biggest problem with economics has been hiding in plain sight since the dawn of civilization.
As societies grew larger than individuals could keep track of their various obligations and favors to the rest of the community, systems of accounting evolved, developing through various mechanisms, traditions, tokens, to being the system of banking and money we have today. As such it is analogous to blood and the circulation system, to effectively distribute value around the community.
The problem is that individually people are linear, goal oriented organisms, while overall nature is a cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated process, with human societies fluctuating between these functions.
So while markets need money to circulate, people see it as the signal to extract and store.
While Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, these are not interchangeable functions. For example, 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 can appreciate the difference, but economists are creatures of habit, aka, herd animals. No tenure otherwise.
Essentially money is a contract, where the asset is backed by a debt. Even gold back currencies are the reciept, not the actual commodity that is the asset.
Yet society has come to view money as a commodity to mine from society, rather than the social contract that enables society.
Which means that in order to store the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated.
One way is to squeeze the flow of money through the larger economy, requiring it to run on debt and draw that saved money back into circulation. This creates a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Since this system is analogous to the circulation system, the effect 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 process, but the modern world has both repressed that need through a few thousand years of top down religious models and the political feudalism it validates, then expanding the economic system through colonialism, industrialization and recently, compounding public debt.
Which is the second primary source of debt, having the government as borrower of last resort. It should be overwhelmingly obvious that the capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in essentially surplus investment money. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
The wars are driven by the need to spend this money in ways that don't compete with private investment, while providing the private sector more forms of investment potential.
Which would explain why they are so strategically inept and no one is held to account. There has never been a time in history when those responsible for such degrees of military incompetence wouldn't have been pretty harshly punished. Instead they mostly remain in positions of power. Go figure.
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 quintessential public utility and needs to be treated as such. Our personal picture isn't on it, we don't individually hold the copyrights and are not personally responsible for maintaining its value.
The fact is there isn't the investment potential for everyone to save the amounts we need, let alone desire, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so an actual functioning society does need some form of commons.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is the resulting atomized society is more easily controlled through insituational mechanisms, as well as mediated by a parasitic financial system.
Government, as the executive and regulatory function of society, is analogous to the central nervous system and it was private once, as well. Now banking is having its own, "Let them eat cake." moment.
The con runs very deep. Keep in mind democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic societies, as the Ancients did not distinguish between culture and civics, so that was the original multiculturalism, while monotheism was how they interpreted a monoculture. One people, one system of rule and one god.
Rome adopted Christianity to solidify the Empire and shed any remnants of the Republic. So the default political system of the West, for the next thousand plus years, was monarchy. When the West went back to more populist forms of government, it required a separation of church and state, culture and civics.
The logical fallacy of modern monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. Confusing the ideal, which is aspirational, with the ideal, which is elemental, creates the belief that everyone's ideals should be absolute and that creates a lot of conflict.
Not to run on, but the bullshit runs deep.
