The money illusion
don’t let yourself get drawn into the money-based economy fantasy.
Thousands of years ago, we — -humankind that is — decided to monetize our environment, and make the planet property, and sell it to each other. To do that we created tokens, called money. We used gold as the ultimate store of value, because gold metal doesn’t deteriorate over time.
Au became the universal currency.
The USA was uniquely fortunate in this respect, having a seemingly infinite amount of resources (Fossil fuels, precious metals etc) with which to underpin her money (hence the global primacy of the dollar.)
The planet could ignore such nonsense while we only numbered 1bn or so, now we’re 7.5bn, and rising — -and still chopping up the planet and pretending we own it and selling it to each other and exchanging bits of paper and plastic to do so. (imitation gold) Now E-money is being touted as the next store of wealth.
This has gone on so long that money itself has become more valuable (to us) than the planet. We call this the ‘money economy’. Governments and economists think it is real. It isn’t. This is why economists now regard ‘physical resources’ as irrelevant.
Hence the certainty that spending money will bring prosperity (Keynes, Krugman et al)
Why did we do it? Because we are running out of planet. Since the 1980s, humankind has been using, each year, more resources than the planet can supply.
Musk says find another planet. Hawking, supposedly with a brain the size of a planet — said find another planet.
So what do we do? — -we create yet more pretend money that doesn’t exist.
Why doesn’t it exist?
Because the physical resources that underpin money do not exist. Without physical resources, money has no value (see above) — the more money you print, the less value it has. This situation can run on for years, based on nothing more than ‘belief’ in BAU. But it cannot run indefinitely.
This why E-money cannot be in any sense except for the few who cash in early — -the source of their money is the input of the latecomers. Money cannot be created out of nothing as a permanent feature of our economic system.
If it could, there would be a ‘government funded’ investment scheme that would pay all our wages.
All well and good, but we base our ongoing situation on having sufficient resources to prop up our current lifestyle. To do this we are stealing our grandchildrens lifestyle, because they too will expect ‘resources’ to be available. But we will have used them up. If you are expecting a pension in 25 years, there will be nothing left to pay it.
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