The Problem with Money

There are serious problems with money, and if you don't know the main one, try doing without it for a while.

Things don't happen until money gives its permission.

These problems exist because of a simple misconception deeply embedded in the way money is taken to exist.

ORIGINS

The origins lie in barter, when items of comparable value were exchanged, one for another. Nobody gave up something of value without getting value.

Next step was to coining precious metals to stabilise peoples' dealing, and that too is still in effect barter.

The problem began when political powers gradually precious metal contents, and stamped coins from base metals, declaring their value to lie in the fact that they were issued by, and acceptable to, authority.

And the form has become progressively more abstract, from coins to notes, notes to cheques, cheques to plastic, and plastic to the electronic.

So, Money is merely a promise, a ticket that provides its carrier with the expectation of something real.

But yet it still is thought of as real - by economists and bankers, by adults and children. We think it real, because of our experience that it's scarce, that only so much of it exists. It has at least that attribute of reality.

Money is the nothing you get for something so that you can get something else, therefore Money only works if it moves.

So, money, as we know nowadays, is NOT a function of any design, nobody planned it this way, nobody even thought about it that much at all, it JUST HAPPENED.

FAILURE

Not everybody have money.

That's the first of the evident failures of conventional money; it leaves things undone that need doing.

Why can't it exist where and when it is needed?

The second failure is probably more dangerous; it gets things done that shouldn't be done.

The pattern of everyday social actions derives from the ways in which money flows through the community. The consequence of these conditions is a economic context in which strategies of competition dominate.

And money is short so everyone competes for what little there is, then you too have to compete to get what you need, you have to compete to live.

People don't respond well to such pressures. This way of working is NOT in any sense an efficient use of human or economic resources.

And if to maintain this pressure it is necessary that large numbers of our community are kept idle, unvalued and alienated, then surely there is something fundamentally wrong about the whole arrangement.

SOLUTION

Within that context, there is virtually nothing that can be done to change matters.

While we only use the old familiar conventional money, there are no real alternatives. The way the game is played is written in the rules.

The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done so far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level we created them at, or what is the same, the tools that broke it, won't fix it.

The good news is this, that when you see what the problem is, you also see that it's really no problem at all.

Source: The Money Problem

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