Fundamental issues with thinking about money

So, I was discussing how large the outstanding money supply is with a friend of mine. His best estimate is there is $20T outstanding, or just about $65k per person currently here.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I see this as likely to be a problem.

We literally do not have enough money to buy even a fraction of the stuff here. If we decided, oh, we want to buy everything that’s in the USA at once, the system would crash, spectacularly. We don’t even have a fraction of the money that we have tangible resource of value.

Now, I understand that most of you take exception to my assertion that the only sane way to think about money in our current system is as being backed by all the real value in the system. It’s clearly not backed by nothing. The value may be propped up by the fact that certain commodities are traded in it, but it’s also clearly not backed by oil.

Backing a currency with a depleting finite resource is exactly the mess we were trying to get out of when we abandoned the gold standard – although, it would appear, in many people’s minds, we abandoned it for the debt standard, which is more than a little nutty. Only 5 countries in the world are not currently in debt to someone – this suggests that loaning money into existence has gotten quite popular – except that I don’t actually think that’s what we’re doing. I think some bean counters have gone ’round the bend. We’re creating real, tangible value – both with intellectual property and scientific discoveries, and with the work we put into building and upgrading physical plant and infrastructure all around the world – as well as, painful as it is to admit, the physical natural resources of the world itself, some renewable, some not.

Anyway, the truth is, if you put on your ‘sane person’ glasses for a minute, that clearly the money is backed by everything you can buy with it. If we could get people to grok this, maybe we could put some more in circulation without people treating it as inflationary. We wouldn’t need to put more in circulation, I should mention, if it wasn’t for the impressive levels of stupidity of the 1%.

We need to give these people something else to use to keep score with, because the money pool – already too small – is spending entirely too much time in their hands. Not only that, ‘interest’ in the financial world does not match what’s going on in the real world. Any time your paper bookkeeping system is out of whack with what’s really happening out there in the world, you’re going to get into trouble. I’ve been avoiding talking about interest for a while now, because I’m still turning over my thoughts about how I would handle it, but I think it is a dangerous thing to do to ask for as much of it as the lenders currently do, because they’re warping the paper tracking system vs. reality. The money is backed by real goods, but while we do have more real goods every day, we do *not* have 27% more of them a year, or probably even 4% of them. I get the temptation to cheat in order to enrich yourself or your corporation, banks, but are you sure you want to court a system crash and play musical chairs with who gets the tangibles when everything comes undone here?

Anyway, back to my assertion that the 1% are being stupid. Every dollar you keep in your bank account beyond your personal needs is a dollar that isn’t out there in the world doing something. In a cash-starved money-based RAS, money that isn’t in motion is useless, worthless. The more money you have in motion, changing hands, facilitating creation and growth and living and the like, the better the quality of life for everyone – including you, none-too-bright 1-percenters, because part of what that money powers is the discovery of intellectual property – which is something you can not buy just by deciding to buy it. Genius is where you find it, and you have no way of knowing which of the many many people around you (some of whom might be starving on the streets) are the genuisi. I encourage you to read about the end of Tesla, and consider that if a few more dollars had come his way, he might have not died when he did, and he might have gone on to create even more cool things that we’d all be using today.

If you read and understood my earlier article on Neurological Wealth, you know that the intellectual property discovered could ultimately be far, far beyond anything that you can currently imagine. There’s good reason to encourage people to get out there and create. This is wealth you can not buy today.. you have to let it grow and accrue naturally, and you’re stifling it so you can *keep score*.

I realize it’s vanishingly unlikely that any of you 1% types read this, and even more unlikely that if you did, you’d understand it. I’ve come to accept that there’s a very small number of people on the globe with both the intelligence and the experience to even understand this discussion, and the odds of very many of them finding their way to my blog are pretty tiny. Nonetheless, I will continue this intellectual exercise, for myself if for no one else.

3 Responses to “Fundamental issues with thinking about money”

  1. Firesong Says:

    This… this is why I admire you.

  2. centauri Says:

    Not to defend the 1%, but I don’t think their hoarding of cash is that high on the list of problems. Rich people typically have diversified holdings of land, stocks, bonds, and tangibles, all of which usually do better than bank deposits. Also, since the non-reserve share of the bank deposits are theoretically available to be loaned out, those actually increase the velocity of money relative to the other investments.

    That said, your criticism of the banks is more than justified — they nearly crashed the financial system in 2008 and we *rewarded* them for doing so, starting with the bailout and continuing through 2014 by letting them profit from the expansion of the money supply (quantitative easing).

  3. Steve Seman Says:

    As you research and redesign, here is an excellent book that shows many of the ways that have been tried to create a system of “currency” in the United States. Starting with Colonial times until 1924, this book is very enlightening to the many variables involved in creating and changing currency systems. Although it is about 600 pages, I learned quite a bit when I read it…

    http://www.dli.ernet.in/handle/2015/158446

Leave a Reply