Unfortunately socialism has become the loyal opposition to capitalism. The antithesis which distracts attention from the various fallacies of capitalism, rather than illuminating them.
We are goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, reciprocal reality. It’s like not fully internalizing the world is not actually flat.
For example, markets need money to circulate, in order to function. Yet we see it as the signal to extract from the noise of society and the economy, to save and store. Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value.
Yet a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store.
Consequently ever more money has to be poured into the system and ever more inventive ways to store what has been extracted. Resulting in the enormous financial bubble currently plaguing the economy.
Given money largely functions as a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt, this means that debts equal to the assets have to be generated.
For one thing, this results in a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of the community, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Given banking functions as the value distribution system of the community, 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 dynamic, but we have been riding the wave of several hundred years of industrialization and colonialism, which has mitigated this effect on the core Western community.
The other consequence is that government has been duped into being debtor of last resort. No one sees fit to comment on this, but it should be evident to all that the financial markets couldn’t function without governments siphoning up trillions in otherwise surplus capital. The US federal debt really began with the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital as well.
It also explains why we can have endless, strategically inept wars and no one is held to account, if their true purpose is to spend the money, in order that more can be borrowed. The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
The functionality of money is its fungibility, so we own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the fluids and air passing through our bodies.
It is a public utility and needs to be treated as such.
The fact is that there isn’t nearly the amount of viable investment available for everyone to save for the future though a system of abstractions. We all save for many of the same reasons, such as housing, raising children, healthcare, retirement, etc, that if these could be invested in communally, rather than everyone trying to save for them individually, we would have healthier societies and environments, as stores of value and not just resources to be plundered.
Various essays I wrote;
