WHAT IS MONEY?
The evidence that money is an invented fantasy is everywhere in plain sight, but no one looks at it that way except the people who now just invent new kinds of money, the same as the nations did when they invented dollars or pesos or whatever. In fact, the value of even traditional money is not the same from one day to another and is subject to the political whims of nations. Why do we let ourselves become so enthralled by it?
I had a friend who had a lot of money by chance and everyone told him to put it into gold. Once he’d bought a pile of gold, he had to put it in the bank for safekeeping. But pretty soon, they wanted to charge him for storing the stuff, though they were willing to let him use it as collateral for speculation, which — of course — meant the chance of losing it without it technically being stolen.
Our present US money has neither gold nor silver nor land as a guarantee. It is an IOU from an entity that may become a deadbeat. Of course, it’s also a convenience so you don’t have to take your latest excess crop to the market in a wheelbarrow for swapping. And it’s a marker for what your value is. Or at least the value of your estate. If you die, your insurance company will figure out how much you are worth, assuming you were doing well enough to buy life insurance.
We no longer think in terms of the intrinsic value of things.
The mafia and Russian oligarchs figured out early that “money” on the internet is a whole new thing that can be sent anywhere, secretly and instantly before being converted into something solid, like land or a house.
In America the effort has been less money laundering and more money gathering and accumulating through laws. The rule of law goes very well with money, so long as the rules are made by those who benefit, which were originally the citizens. But number obsession and the suppression of humanities have let us think that money is faceless.
In fact, as money changes in amount it changes what it is. It’s easy to see that living things change behavior and characteristics when there are more of them — a flock of birds or school of fish acting together — and even to recognize that a pack of dogs will behave quite differently than when they are apart. But few consider the difference between managing a week’s salary of a few hundred dollars and managing an invested amount of millions. It’s not just more, it’s different.
I maintain that after a certain amount of money, wealth is no longer a matter of personal value, but rather a business managed by a team. Calling themselves a corporation, they pretend to be a unified human body. They have neither a morality nor hedonic desire, but merely the compulsion to maintain or — better — grow. This is how we judge everything, though money is quite apart from any real place with rain and trees or a real herd of cows to be fed and sold.
We tax and control these financial entities as though they were the person who putatively “owns” them, though that person may have very little contact with the basic actions through an average day. The decisions of the CEO, who is hired by the boss — or a board he or she was chosen by — are meant to please the boss or board — NOT to benefit the populace.
In more innocent times, I thought that corporations, theoretically owned by many small shareholders, would be a curb, voting as though they were citizens caring about a nation. But they are merely greedheads trying to maximize their hoard before death. Rather than a curb on profiteering, they were an additional incitement.
Something similar to the corruption of wealth has happened to education, so that a drunk can beer-guzzle his way onto the Supreme Court. Laws that were based on a long history of grief and war through Europe, gradually developing a gentleman’s code of behavior that allowed enough predictability and consistency for business to succeed, has been discarded. Business is gambling.
The reputation of money is tightly gripped by merchandizing, and so is politics. But a few people begin to make lists of the laws that are damaging the system, so now we can see and reverse them. Robert Reich is particularly good at this. One can begin simply by reversing Trump’s laws.
But growth, money, and reputation have not just created monster trillionaires. They have hypnotized religious institutions, mega universities, and artists. I speak first hand as a minister once tasked with growing congregations, as an alum of Northwestern University constantly being asked for money or a least stories of success, and as the watching ex-wife of a man once worth millions whose fortunes are now in a steel warehouse at an airport in Helena, Montana. As well as the pockets of lawyers who only know money, not art.
I’m told by a lawyer that the way to success in Montana is through gaining control of estates that are largely land, the original value before money. We see wealth in a unique way in this wide open prairie. Ranches, whether wheat or livestock, are rarely translated to money and therefore valued and taxed in unique ways.
Counties are small and controlled by friendship and business interests. Lately we’ve seen the invasion of huge corporations, including parts of the federal government. The lively underclass of criminals is enabled by distance, need, vulnerability, and failure to most people to understand. The line between criminals and enforcers is blurred by violence and righteousness. You can take these accusations to the bank.
