Lawrence,
I can well understand not wanting to get into sociological issues, because there tends to be much more heat than light, but I think there is a point in here worth clarifying.
It is that there is a crucial fallacy built into our assumptions of notational currencies, whether they are backed by any form of commodity, or by debt. They are functionally a contract, but we treat them as a commodity. Yes, to the extent they are ubiquitous and fungible, they do function as a commodity, but an IOU is a contract, a written promise. When we only think it as a form of commodity, we lose sight of the obligations which give it value and treat it as possessing value in its own right. Then the tendency becomes to simply manufacture as much of these notational units as possible, with increasingly less concern for the underlaying strength of the obligations effectively giving them value in the first place. It is like a line of shortcut code, built into the operating system of society, which allows tumors of unsustainable debt to accumulate, until they blow up.
In fact, to the extent it is underwritten by public debt, it amounts to a contract between a society and its members and so if we were to begin to understand and treat it as such, an entirely different set of assumptions would develop.
For one thing, if the average person were to really begin to understand it as a form of public medium and utility and one no more owned those pieces of paper in one's pocket, anymore than we own the section of road we happen to be driving on, there would be much less natural incentive to extract value from one's life and environment in order to acquire these units of exchange. This would make one's community and it locality the more obvious store of value and not just resources to be mined. Then alot of the functions within this communal network, such as elder and child care, primary education, local community projects, etc, would evolve more organic systems of exchange and reciprocity, even local currencies.
As a contract, it would be understood the function is for the benefit of both parties, not a system to siphon value out of the community and those mistreating the system would not be appreciated.
There would be less need to store these notes, with all the systemic problems this creates, such as creating far more than is efficient, or speculative feedback loops creating bubbles.
As it is, the current system is being methodically destroyed by the very people currently most benefiting from it and when the next significant financial crisis hits, just creating lots more public debt to bail out the speculators is not going to be as easy a sell and isn't going to kick the can that much further down the road.
The fact is that life and society do function according to basic physical principles, such as convection, thermodynamics, causality, suction, etc and it would be beneficial if those schooled in these fields did not hide in the classrooms and laboratories when there are system failures, because this does leave the problem solving to those less objective and more opportunistic.
Tee,
The logical fallacy of monotheism is that it claims God to be an absolute, not just an ideal. A spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell. It just so happens to be politically convenient to claim God as an ideal, as this tends to validate top down forms of governance.
Regards,
John Merryman
