You’re still not thinking big enough. This neo-liberal world order is a coat of polish on good old capitalism. Which is history’s biggest scam.
It presumes to be just another term for a market based economy, but why does a system presumably priding itself in efficiency insist on blowing enormous, immensely destructive speculative bubbles, if it’s efficient? Might the actual dynamics be somewhat misleading?
We are goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, reciprocal reality, so while markets need money to circulate, we see it as the signal to extract from the noise of the economy. Which requires ever more to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been “saved.”
While money is generally assumed to be some kind of commodity, with intrinsic value, the fact is that as a glorified voucher system, it is a contract between the individual and the community, with the asset backed by a debt.
As such, it makes a very effective medium of exchange, but to store the asset, requires similar amounts of debt to be created.
One way to do this is by restricting the flow of money through the larger economy, which results in debt being used to sustain it and thus putting “investment capital” to work. Consequently positive feedback draws the asset the center of society, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges.
Since banking serves as the value distribution mechanism for the entire 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 society, but after a few centuries of colonialism, industrialization and globalization, our system is only just reaching the limits.
Another method is having the government as debtor of last resort. Long story, but quite evidently the capital markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus money. Where would it go, otherwise? Derivatives? The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
The problem is that money is a lubricant, not a fuel. Econ 101 says it’s both medium of exchange and store of value, but a medium is dynamic, while a store is static. Blood is a medium, bone, muscle and fat are stores. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store. If the average five year old has learned the difference, are economists just that dumb, or are they paid to act dumb?
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 passing through our bodies. It’s a public utility and has to be treated as such. As individuals, it’s not our picture on it and we don’t hold the copyrights. The government could tax out what it currently borrows out. Then people would quickly find other ways to store for the future.
There simply isn’t enough investment potential to hold all the notational value we feel we need, but we all do save for many of the same reasons, such as raising children, housing, healthcare, retirement, etc, that if these could be invested in, as community assets and networks, rather then everyone trying to save for them individually, we would have stronger communties and a healthier environment, as a store of value and not just resources to be mined.
As the executive and regulatory function, government 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 when monarchs lost sight of the fact they served a function to society, in order to be served by it, they were usurped. Now banking is having its, “Let them eat cake.” moment.
Not that banking could be a direct function of government, as politicians live and die on the hope they inspire, so printing more money is an easy cheat. Like the head and heart, they are separate and serve separate functions.