Money

Posted on November 21, 2003 in Consuming Thinking

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about money. Not just in the sense of ‘do I have enough to buy that book?’ but for broader implications that most of us don’t think about when we pop those quarters into the coke machine.

Money is more symbolic that real. If you collected all the U.S. currency in the world — the quarters, the Susan B. Anthony dollars with their kinky edges, the pennies filed down to the size of dimes for purposes of cheating vendors, the silver certificates held in collections, — I mean every single last cent no mattered if it is warped, bent, half melted, half burnt, or torn in half, you would not have nearly enough to cover the amount of money that is on the books in today’s banks and brokerage houses. Money is not a physical object: it is an idea that we give sacred value to (“in God we trust” as the legend on our coins state) and which our financial institutions freely coin.

Money comes down to an enforced fantasy: you must have it or you cannot trade.

Banks make money all the time. Many years ago, I watched as a supply-side economist showed me how this was done. (This explains how it happens.) What this means is that all the Right wing talk about how raising the minimum wage leads to inflation is just plain wrong. What devalues money is the creation of more money and the people who are responsible for this are the big financial institutions and the people who take out huge capital loans. They’re making you feel guilty for an economic process that is entirely their fault.

So it’s not the working classes getting a fair share of the profits that accounts for the ever rising cost of vegetables, of the price of gas, and of housing, but the devaluation of our common currency by agents and processes that exist beyond the government, unchecked by law.

It seems to me that if this is a matter of a commons, it shouldn’t be beyond democratic controls and in private hands. We the People should stop and rethink the international banking process to check relentless inflation and prevent the flow of commodity power out of the hands of the many and into those of the few.