Is Money And Credit The Problem?
Friends, late last night during a period of sleeplessness, I turned on CNN and there, before my very eyes, was a scene of frenzied human activity. There was shouting, clapping, shrieking, animated throwing of pieces of paper, wild excitement. Was it a football game? Was it a revolution? Was it an orgy?
No, it was the reaction in Wall Street when the direction of the fall to minus 696 points began to reverse. Within ten minutes it hovered around minus two hundred points. Would it reached zero, then go up? Would it, would it? The announcer described the situation as being like the closing period of a horse race.
Here were these ‘intelligent’ humans suffering adrenalin overdoses because the value of a piece of share script were tending towards a point where it might have actually increased in value rather than lost more. It struck me then that this whole frenzied spectacle was enabled and facilitated by one thing: money. And cabbages might be the solution!
It is money, paper money, and the fact that it can be accumulated without doing anything but gamble, that encourages greed in humans, encourages extreme risk-taking. If we had no money or access to money via credit and again went back to the barter system, then less greed would exist. Why?
Imagine if you can someone wanting to accumulate a fortune in cabbages. He, let’s call him McMurdoch, might imagine himself owning a cellar full of cabbages. Now what’s wrong with that? Well, nothing I guess but the problem is that within a short period of time, the cellar full of cabbages would begin to rot and attract bugs and, before you know it, the cabbages are worth nothing except perhaps as pig food and, eventually, not even that. So there is no incentive for McMurdoch to hoard cabbage or most other consumables. Besides you can’t imagine someone borrowing a hundred cabbages to buy a new suit. What would the tailor do with a hundred cabbages and how would the borrower grow a hundred and ten cabbages (10 cabbages interest) to pay back the loan?
The barter system ensures that people only accumulate what they need and can consume whereas money, the root of all evil, allows them to accumulate far more than they need and hoard it and grow it and flaunt it. This means that we have people who already have billions of dollars who still spend their lives trying to accumulate more paper money until the day when they die and return to dust leaving their relatives to fight over the spoils, many of them ill-gotten.
Friends, the solution to the world’s problems is to do away with money and return to the barter system. Immediately we would adopt a sustainable lifestyle and greed would largely disappear because the stuff that lubricates it: money, and the high octane gas that feeds it: credit, wouldn’t exist.
Surely this is preferable to the current economic fiasco and a damaged, warring world divided into a small percentage of haves while the rest of us struggle or starve!
David,
There was no greed before money… you’re kidding right?
Money is nothing more than an abstraction for wealth. As you suggest we used to consume our wealth by eating it (corn, sheep, rice, etc.).
Money however is just a part of a very complex human innovation picture including other factors like complex governments, organizational structure, communications, mathematics, economics, written language, mining, and the whole innovation cycle. Without doubt money made it easier to do a lot of things, but way before “money” people were using things that made it easier to safeguard, carry, and barter with their wealth.
Q
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Thanks for your comment, Q. You are right of course. Humans are greedy. Always have been. I’ve amended my post to reflect your point.
However, few people would argue that money doesn’t facilitate greed. Cheers.
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That s why I m here. Simply, I am Big Fan and LOVE YOUR POSTS and your image choices! This one made me laugh like mad!
David, you re a genius.
Hurray to the cabbage!!!!!!!!!!
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I wanted to bring a touch of humour to the world, Adina, while raising an interesting issue. Glad I made you happy.
Cheers.
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Whether it is money, food or any other commodity, it is the uneven distributuion of it that causes the problems.
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David, shame on you. You unleashed the typing beast in me
I tried to abstain… but couldn’t resist your intellectual charm. 
Here I go again:
We are sentient beings. “Sentient” means AWARE but also ALIVE..
We need love. we need play.
The world is full of sad facts, to which one may tend to become immune, or bitter, after too much cold rationalization and feeling of impotence.
The beauty of humour is that it can create that sudden joy of an intellectual revelation carried by an apparently trivial but in reality deep message of laughter. It bluntly unveils the ridiculousness of our so dear reality, making it suddenly insignificant, while revealing obvious and powerful alternatives.
As long as it ‘s humor with brains, I find humour one of the best communications tool:
- able to wake us up from apathy
- able to give a bit of relief against despair and feeling of impotence
- able to give a sudden jolt of enhanced human experience through the powerful conjoining of mind and soul
- creating unity between individuals. Look at a laughing crowd. Look at their eyes, and the life that explodes with the laughter.. A laughing crowd feels somehow attuned, more together.
Your message hits deep.
So Hurray to the cabbage again!
It really made my day.
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Lucy, it’s the competitive capitalist regime which is built on inequality that causes the problem.
A strongly controlled capitalist regime might work better.
Ah, Adina, I’m so pleased you’re back. And the cabbage world is too! They have gained new importance.
Cheers.
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Greed has always existed. The “cure” for greed is not to outlaw money, but to promote an evolution in human consciousness. Money is chased and hoarded as an IMMORTALITY substitute by the ego, which fears death, because the human race has not evolved in sufficient numbers to realize the awareness that the only true immortality is found within, i.e., at/one with Spirit, which is Eternal and Infinite Light and Love, which fosters a consciousness that does not desire more than it needs, and wishes for the well-being of all other beings on this planet.
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I do not desire more than I need and I wish for the well-being of all others, Racetoinfinity but I do not feel at one with Spirit, whatever that means.
Perhaps you could elaborate?
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I ve visited Seeking Utopia.. and I ve become highly inspired by it. i therefore chose to write a poem .. about Oneness, God, and trivial matters, as I live it..
Oneness
I Loved to Pray, and Hated money.
I humbly lived to please my God.
The Corporate Business moved to China.
My wish was heard. I lost my job.
I loved to pray, I hated money.
I humbly lived below my means.
But when the Corporate moves to China
Even “Below” “Foreclosure” means.
I stick to God, went to His shelter.
Found many like me, prayed as such.
The priest had welcomed all our sufferance.
He loved us.. and loved my Son too much.
I moved away, to distant country.
But here my hair seems to be shame.
I said to God:”Why have you made me?”
“To obey Me, and please your man”.
My agony has reached the limit,
I thought: “ the Oneness “. True belief.
But when they charged PayPal Or Visa..
Oh, Oneness.. GST* relief? *(or VAT depending to your country)
******
I loved to pray. I hated money.
I fooled you all, since I began.
For I, myself ..
Have never had a Son.
Or house to lose, for what it matters…
But that’s the feeling
If you claim you’re ONE…
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Just love your poem, Adina, so clever! You bring a new dimension to my humble blog.
Peace.
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You are a business man, David G., right. And so if seeing the behavior of the stockbrokers at the Wall Street Exchange shocks you, let me tell you, it totally grosses me out.
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So HAPPY you like it! It was inspired by our discussions, and by this blog.. I m happy I can contribute to this Great Blog!
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You know it’s funny, it is obvious in a round about way some of the contributors to this blog, actually are, in a not to subtle way, defending a system that is rotten to its very foundation.
Of course what they will always tell you is, that Wall St creates wealth, jobs, and we have never had it so good.For the people at the very bottom nothing has changed.
Before it was the “Medievil” bully boys calling the tune, and now it is Wall St.
And even after the whole house of cards is tumbling over before our very eyes,and the crisis that is unwinding and sending country’s bankrupt, they still think it’s “business as usual”
I really can’t believe how people are taking this fiasco so lightly.Billions of dollars are being extracted out of government coffers, )never mind the fact it can take governments 12 months to decide where to place a public toilet,)”at the speed of light”
To try and look for answers in Greek philosophy and mythology in circa 2008 really does blow my mind.
What should be happening here is,the law enforcement agencies of each of the countries affected (of course after they have weeded out the corrupt bastards that are involved in this fiasco)the C.E.O.s stock brokers and all the other shysters that have been living high on the hog on the backs of factory workers and others.
Should be taken out and strung up on a light pole.Yes! I am damn serious.
As an aside, I watched Foreign Correspondent last night,a stock broker or number cruncher, came out of the NYSE on Wall St and on seeing a demonstrator with a placard with GREED on it called him a loser.Yea only one, it screamed out volumes about these greedy toads.
You know I was brought to tears about ten years ago,a women had a garage sale in a suburb near us.The purpose of which, was to raise money for a wheelchair for a child with a disability.The government telling her there was no money.
Sort of sums up the human race for me.
I bloody despair.
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Yeah, it’s a pretty funny world, Phill, in a sick kind of way. Thing is that shares and real estate is where the wealthy have their gold nest eggs and there’s no way they are going to allow the system that allowed them to become rich to be threatened.
This financial crisis is an opportunity for the world to set up a whole new economic order, one based upon equality and cooperation. Instead governments take taxpayers’ money to prop up the corrupt, elitist, dog-eat-dog system.
The purpose of mentioning Ancient Greece was to point out that there have been a few societies that weren’t driven by naked greed, that actually had values!
Cheers.
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Thank you Phill, but don’t despair. At the end, if you read A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY, Kurt Vonnegut teetered on despair about humanity, and suggests that we all 1) get a dog, and 2) find comfort in being very kind toward sales clerks, grateful for them being there. I treasure this advise. And David G., thank you so much for your truth telling.
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I vow to reincarnate as a lethal virus to humble the evil elite.
Let’s outlaw money on 09.09.09.
http://paradise-planet.blogspot.com/2008/11/your-last-chance.html
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