Jonathan,
This was a reply I'm cross posting from my own thread. To a certain extent it goes deeper into the argument I'm trying to make, given the further insights from various conversations in this contest:
"It's not so much a question of life being unequal and often unfair, but the much more specific dynamics of why this current situation is going parabolic and how can it be logically addressed.
Society is always going to have winners and losers and different strata and both friction and exchange between them all. As I keep saying, much of human activity on the surface of this planet can be modeled by the same thermodynamic convection cycles which pretty much explain most of the abiotic and much of the biotic activity.
Much as our body has cells which are of the feet and of the brain, so too does society have different functions, with different uses, even fat cells. Yet if you had a brain which didn't listen to what the feet had to say, it would have serious problems and it is this lack of feedback between the different parts of society which leads to break downs, not the various differences.
Money originated in many forms and situations. Some were actual commodities, like the salt paid to Roman soldiers. Others originated as a form of contract, like the clay token Sumerians used as receipts for grain, which were then traded around. Much of what we think of as money today, is various forms of contracts. Promises of some value for which the certificate can be exchanged. National currencies, now that they are completely backed by the debt of the issuing country, are based on the future health, wealth and productivity of that country.
Remember when many banks had the term "Trust" as part of the name? The problem is that since we all want money, not just the rich, because it signifies security and stability for most, it creates a strong incentive to produce more than there are resources to back it with. Now that the situation has grown completely out of control and the very function of the economy is to produce ever more of these increasingly unsupported and unsupportable promises, which become ever more leveraged and ethereal, that the actual health, wealth and productivity of the world is being sacrificed to manufacture them.
When you really stand back and think it through, it is as ultimately illogical as those Easter Islanders who destroyed their island to manufacture those stone monoliths, because they signified some overriding ideal, that became meaningless when the society collapsed.
The fact is that we do need a medium of exchange for large societies to function, but it is a public medium, like a road system and to the extent it is based on public debt, ie. obligations, it is a contract between a community and its members, that one's services will be rewarded.
Now in some ways, it is like blood in the civic body and like blood, it needs to keep flowing evenly around and large pools of it are extremely unhealthy and functionally unnecessary.
Since the main reason most people save money is for large purchases, retirement, eduction, etc. Then other, more effective social mechanisms need to evolve around those needs, leaving the conventional monetary system to handle the more liquid aspects. For one thing, if we understood strong communities and a healthy environment are a valuable resource and time and effort should be invested in maintaining them, such activities as elder, youth care and education might function much more as organic expressions of society. Not to mention having manufacturing produce products which could be maintained and last a long time and not simply be thrown away, it would create a significant local servicing capacity.
Since it would be acknowledged as a contract, those caught abusing the system would consequently have the value of their notes penalized.
Essentially all this requires is acknowledging these notes are not personal property, but public contracts and that is exactly what they are in the first place!! Your picture is not on them, nor are you individually responsible for guaranteeing their value. Consider that if the average Joe Sixpack understood those bills in his pocket were no more his property than the section of road he was driving on, he would be far less impressed with possessing as many of them as possible and would be careful what tangible value he would exchange for them. His efforts would have to go to making his family life more important, his social relations stronger and his environment healthier, because he would know that this is what would matter, not how many zeros are in his bank account. Then consider what this would do to the governments and financial industries currently drunk on all this power we subconsciously give them.
The fact is that since the system has gone parabolic and every time it has another heart attack, the response is more of the same and so the problem grows even bigger. When the next crisis occurs, it is going to start to be obvious to pretty much everyone that it is unsustainable. Then people will be looking for other answers."
Sorry if this cross cuts between different concepts, but I figure making it short is preferable to filling in every gap.
Regards,
John
