You are right that liberal and conservative are two sides of the fundamental dynamic manifesting civilization, that of the social expansion driving it and the cultural consolidation giving it form and structure.
Another aspect of the forces at work is that government, the executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nervous system, while money and banking, as the value distribution system, is analogous to blood and the circulation system.
Our country has long had a system where the real power is in this financial circulation system, not so much in the political system. While this relationship has been fairly evident, it has now become obvious the political system is little more than a hollow shell, increasingly emptied of all relevance by the parasites controlling banking.
Capitalism is supposedly synonymous with a free market economy, but people are linear, goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, reciprocal, feedback driven reality. So while markets need money to flow around as a medium, like blood in the body, people see it as the signal to extract from the noise of society and the economy, to save and store, like fat.
The problem is that money functions as a contract between the individual and the community, so the asset is backed by a debt. Requiring similar amounts of debt to be generated to store the assets we feel we need.
One primary method is to squeeze the amount of money running through the necessary economy, requiring it to run on debt and draw that investment money back into the system. Aka, austerity. Thus all those mortgages, car, student, credit card loans, etc, sliced and diced as securities.
This creates a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of the community, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Which 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 the resulting imbalance, but we are only just reaching the point where it starts to really destroy the communal body.
The other primary method is for the government to be debtor of last resort. It doesn’t take much perception to realize the capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus capital, but it seems to elude most commentators. Public debt backs private wealth.
Which explains why we can have endless, strategically inept wars and no one is held to account, if their underlaying function is to spend the money, in order that more can be borrowed and Wall St safely rests on trillions of publicly backed bonds.
The fact is there isn’t the investment potential to store the amounts of notational value we feel we need, but we do save for many of the same reasons, such as raising children, housing, healthcare, retirement, that if these could be invested in as community assets and networks, maybe we wouldn’t have such an atomized culture.The community and its environment could be stores of value and not just resources to be mined.
The functionality of money 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. It really is a public utility, a glorified voucher system, and needs to be treated as such. This isn’t socialism, as there are both public and private needs in society, much as a house has personal spaces and family spaces. We need to understand what works best. Money should be thought of as an accounting device, for a healthy community, not the God controlling it.
As it is, when the system gives us a choice between a deranged clown and a demented puppet, it should be clear this ship is going down. The scab is slowly separating from the injured flesh.
Time to look to what will replace it.
