Money is a central feature of cultures all over the world and has been so for thousands of years. The average person can tell you what it is, and what it is for, but few could really tell you much about why it has value. There is wisdom in the common Biblical saying, “Money is the root of all evil.” But it would be more accurate to say that it is the love of money, otherwise known as greed, that is closer to the root of evil.
Money, speaking practically, is a means by which we measure the value of the labor we have performed. When I have performed X value in labor, I am given X value represented in the form of money. It is not greedy or evil to desire to perform work in order to receive the equal value in money. This is simply an advanced survival strategy mastered by human beings.
Gold became an early standard because of its utility, malleability, and resistance to corrosion. Gold could be made into coins of various sizes that could easily be carried and represent different denominations. But it was the introduction of the banks that removed a layer of protection between a naturalistic system of currency and the motivations of the greedy.
As it happened in many early societies, the operator of an agricultural enterprise was likely to own relatively secure structures for the storage of grain. Some of the earliest forms of these grain storage structures were built into the side of a hill, or ‘bank.’
When such a person suffered a poor harvest, these buildings could be used to store the cash, grain, and goods of people in the local community to be represented in the form of gold coins- if not some other form of currency.
It was no great leap of logic for these bankers to realize that because of their special status in the community they were trusted to secure the valuables of everyone. Because your goods are private, I have no right to see what you have stored in the bank and because I have no right to see my own property as long as it is stored alongside your stored goods- the entire contents of the bank are now completely secret from the entire community. Everyone simply trusts that their belongings are in there, safe.
This is the beginning of money as trust- rather than as “gold.”
The Federal Reserve comes to mind as Americans, and countries all over the world who trust the reserve to hold their gold begin to question whether or not the gold is really there- and they have no ability to look inside and check. They simply have to take the Fed’s word that it is there. This has led to a crisis in the system of money as trust.
Money in the form of trust is the basis of fiat currency. Fiat means subject to royal decree, that is to say arbitrary- and based on a special status within a society. This is how the bankers have become the rulers of the world- by obtaining mastery over the currency.
The one barrier to a system of completely fiat-based currency is matter, as in physical substance. This process runs along a spectrum from gold to complete insubstantiality in the form of digital coin. The less substantial the currency is, the easier it is for a Banking power such as the Federal Reserve to damage the value of money through inflation.
When paper money came into being with the advent of the printing press we moved further toward the fiat side of the spectrum with imminently disposable paper money.
Today, we are on the verge of a cashless society. Those without access to the tools to track digital money can be dismissed as dregs. Having worked as a hotel auditor and seeing people turned away because they had no credit card- despite having plenty of cash on hand- I can tell you first hand- the existential threat posed to individuals by a digital economy is very real.
Inflation is the direct consequence of printing money, in law, only the Fed has the right to print money. But the fact is that banks create money every day in the form of credit. Debts created from mortgage loans, business finance, and the like are entirely cashless- and they generate interest. This is the creation of fiat currency on a computer screen by your friendly local banker.
This is driving inflation at record levels, and we all bear some of the responsibility.
~ Conservative Zone
