I have been thinking about this a lot lately , but money does not make any sense , it is just an ideology or an idea in a paper form and still we value everything in form of that idea!
Money is cool when it enables the cobbler to trade it for bread instead of the shoes he makes. This way, when the baker doesn’t need anymore shoes they still have reason to trade. Money is not cool when 400 people use it to impose their will over 8 billion others.
I think that sums up my views on money and capitalism. It’s VERY necessary for equality, like your example. With money rather than simply trading goods, the cobbler has the ability to have a full pantry as often as the shopkeep who has more to provide far more frequently. But it’s also extremely flawed, and also make inequality really, really easy. The cobbler can only make and sell so many shoes in a period of time, but a general goods shopkeep has lots of things to sell all the time, and he doesn’t have to make those goods himself, so he’s bound to be wealthier than the cobbler, unless the cobbler raises his prices, at which point fewer common folk would be able to afford his shoes, giving them less options for shoes, and/or less money to spend on other necessities. If only the world could be a little simpler sometimes.
Money makes sense if you look at the history of it. People used to barter, but what if you didn’t have what the other person needed? Valuable items were used as an intermediary when trading, like jewellery made of precious metal or just coins of precious metals.
Having a lot of money sitting around isn’t safe so it went into a bank vault. The banks gave out slips to show how much money you had and people would trade these paper slips instead of the metal coins.
Eventually though the fractional banking system allowed money to be created from nothing, which meant the paper slips no longer represented precious metal in a vault. So now money doesn’t represent anything besides a promise. Personally, I don’t know if going back to trading bits of gold and silver really changes anything than trading bits of 0s and 1s.
Money is time. You use your own time to earn money so that you can buy time from others for their goods and services.
And it’s easier than chickens.
So billionaires time worth wayyyyy more than our time ?
He does not work himself. His employees do with their time. And the buyers of his goods (cars, phones…) make him richer with their money (time).
Read the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson.
Man, I’m too baroque to buy any books.
Money is a slice of the country’s economic output.
