The difference between capitalism and markets is that while markets and nature are circular and cyclical, people are linear and goal oriented. So while markets need money to circulate, people see it as the signal to extract and store. Which means more has to be constantly added and more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted have to be devised.
While we tend to view money as a commodity, the reality is that it is a contract, in which the asset is backed by an obligation or debt. Even gold backed currencies are a reciept for the gold.
Today money is largely backed by government debt.
Which means that not only does government have to incur debt to create it, rather than siphoning off the excesses through taxation, it borrows much of the excess back out. The financial markets couldn't function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus money. Expensive militaries and endless wars are just a way to make it go away, so that more can be borrowed. The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
Not to mention that squeezing the money flowing through much of society requires it to run on debt, drawing that saved money back into circulation, as these personal and commercial loans are bundled and sold as investments.
Eventually we will have to come to terms with the fact there isn't sufficient investment potential to store the amounts of notational wealth we feel necessary, so the premise of the commons will have to be resurrected, as a means of storing communal value.
The functionality of money is in its fungibility. It is a medium. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the fluids passing through our bodies.
Contrary to Econ 101, it is doesn't work as both a medium of exchange and store of value. 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. Your five year old can figure that out.
Money is a public utility and needs to be treated as such. People need to understand it is a tool to enable mass societies to function, not be their god.
Store value in stronger communties and healthier environments, not in the bank.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is that it creates an atomized society that is more easily manipulated by instititutional authority and mediated by a parasitic financial system. Networks, organic, cultural and civil, matter as much as the nodes occupying them.
Government, as the executive and regulatory function of society, is analogous to the central nervous system, as money and banking are to blood and the circulation system. There was a time when government was private, but as monarchs lost sight of the function they performed, they were usurped.
Now banking is having its, "Let them eat cake." moment.
