Why I don't like the monetary system
Okay, well the scope of this topic is HUGE I mean absolutely gigantic. I spent a day thinking about it and I blew out all my brain cells. After I replaced them I had a massive panic attack and curled up in foetal position for a few hours. Then I calmed down and realised that it’s just a blog and I shouldn’t have so much performance anxiety over it. Give me time for my arguments to come together, to save you from reading book length articles I will often have to state something in one article and give my reasoning in the next. It may also take me some time to get to all the relevant topics (game theory, border abolition, vampire bats etc.). I have set myself a huge challenge and I may well be over my head but I’ll try anyway.
Right let’s get started: money and why I don’t like it. We live in a society that where we all depend on each other. If the sewerage workers that spend all day wading in shit don’t maintain our sewerage system it will stop working and we end up getting sick from diseases like cholera. If farmers stop producing food we either don’t eat or we have to produce it ourselves. If doctors stop working we die prematurely. If artists of all kinds stop creating we may survive but be bored shitless. This is obvious and yet the monetary system values all these players differently despite the fact we need them equally. It is like saying you value your liver more than your digestive system.
It isn’t so much the fact that the system is anti-egalitarian that bothers me, though that is part of it. It’s the fact that it often makes us forget, or at least conveniently ignore, the fact that we live in a cooperative society. The monetary system (referred to from here on as MS, not to be confused with the disease) is essentially a competitive system. Money puts us in the moment and doesn’t give us incentive to look at the bigger picture, to be generous or have any sort of social conscience. The message from money is “I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine,” when it should be “Everybody is scratching everybody’s back so I’ll keep scratching if you will.”
Money doesn’t give people incentive to care about its previous or future transactions. Money has the same value whether was been earned legitimately, begged, borrowed, stolen, picked up off the ground, received as payment for drugs etc. etc. In other words money has no history attached to it. You can’t tell whether its exchanges benefited or harmed society, at least not without a whole squad of police to trace its history. Basically it doesn’t really give us incentive to earn it in legal ways. The law does that but only as a clumsy bandaid measure.
Money is not truly linked to value. Read a definition of money anywhere and try to see more than an abstract link to true value. Some examples include linking money to a gold standard. In simple terms you have a heap of gold in a reserve and you say this amount of money will buy you this much gold. The amount of gold in the reserve you have affects the value and amount of the money in circulation. It doesn’t matter that the gold isn’t actually doing anything useful; it is sitting there giving the money value, brilliant (the economists on here are now grinding their teeth). When you really think about it you see that the value of money is simply given by the fact people accept it as payment.
So what is it that we really value and therefore what should our exchanges/actions actually be based on? Well obviously we value our survival and our happiness. If we are thinking of the bigger picture we should value the survival and happiness of others (this makes good sense, even for selfish reasons). If we are thinking of the long-term big picture we should value assurance of our continued survival and happiness of both others and ourselves. At this last point the MS fails miserably e.g. we put money ahead of our environment. Remember the system should be there to support us not the other way around. The MS is a run away meme, it has detached itself from its original purpose to some degree and become an end rather than a means.
In the next article we will do a thought experiment. In this experiment we see what money actually does for us and to us. Hopefully it will bring its good points and bad points into stark relief.