The reality is that nature is cyclical and circular, while people are linear and goal oriented, so while markets need money to circulate, people see it as the signal to extract and store. Requiring ever more to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted.
While we think of it as a commodity, the fact is that it is a contract, with the asset backed by a debt. Even gold backed currencies are the receipt, not the gold.
Which means our culture of money requires an economy of debt to back it.
Squeezing money flowing through the regular economy requires it to run on debt, drawing the saved money back into circulation. Which sets up a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center and negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Since money and banking serve as the value distribution system of society, this is analogous to 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 finds innumerable ways to keep the process going.
The other main method is having the government as debtor of last resort. It should be extremely obvious that the capital markets couldn't function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus investment money. Where would it go otherwise? Derivatives? Even higher stock prices? Real estate?
These endless wars are just one way to make it go away, so more can be borrowed.
The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
As a contract, money makes a very effective medium of exchange, but poor store of value, for the aforementioned reasons.
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 understands the difference and eventually even the economists will figure it out.
There simply isn't the investment potential to save the amounts we feel necessary, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so the function of the public commons will eventually have to be resurrected. Which is not socialism, as society needs both public and private functions, like a house has both personal and family spaces. The trick is figuring out which is which.
The reality is that money is a public utility. It's not our own face on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not individually responsible for sustaining its value.
As a medium, its functionality is in its fungibility. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies.
The irony of our individualistic ethos is that the resulting atomized culture is more easily manipulated by institutional authorities and mediated by a parasitic financial system. Networks, organic, social and economic, matter as much as the nodes inhabiting them.
As the executive and regulatory system, government is analogous to the central nervous system, as money and banking are the blood and circulation system.
There was a time when government was private, but as monarchs lost sight of the function they served, in order to be served, they were usurped. Now banking is having its own, "Let them eat cake." moment.
