this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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I don't think I'm getting the "money if fake" one. Money is just an IOU that we've all agreed on the value of to simplify bartering.
Sounds like you are exactly getting the "money is fake" one
Right but what point is it trying to make by pointing it out?
Yes, money is a social construct, but it's a construct that represents something real, i.e. trade. Without money we'd replace it with something else, but it ultimately comes down to the same thing.
Like, I can understand the perfect world without landlords or billionaires and so on, but what's this perfect world look like that has no currency?
Typically societies without money historically operated in what’s called a gift economy. Basically most goods were shared amongst the community. However there are very few remaining today.
Money is fiat currency. Literally a stand in for something with actual value. Money holds no intrinsic value. You can't eat it, you can't breathe it or use it in anyway except to trade for things that do have actual intrinsic value. The only thing money allows humans to do is go into debt. That debt has created a society with insane leaps and bounds in innovation, but the cost is that it's a ponzi scheme that will collapse spectacularly.
Only if you treat debt as something absolute that has to be repaid no matter what.
In reality in many cases debt is written off as impossible to claw back and sold off to unscrupulous debt enforcement companies at a fraction of the nominal value. Who in turn also rarely manage to get the money.
We as society could simply decide to forget certain types of debt and basically that is what states do via inflation and which historically many societies have done via debt jubilees.
The book "Debt the first 5000 years" gives good overview on this matter and fiat currencies in general.
I never agreed to it, and the way it's dispersed only benefits the people that already have too much of it from exploiting other people's labor.
I see what you're trying to say. But I gotta ask tho: did "we all" actually, really agree on that?
Problem is the majority of money is tied up overseas and in shit like the stock exchange, the insurance market, crazy real estate speculation and various other investments. If any decent portion of that gets leveraged back into material goods everyone trying to simply live is suddenly poor as fuck and starving to death. The value of money is based on so many assumptions it's unsound.
Not that you're wrong in practice, but there's nothing at guaranteeing that practice is stable and people's lives depend on that very stability.
Careful with that thinking there, mister. Soon enough you'll be rederiving civilisation and suggesting things like power structures and statutory social order.