Topic: Money is an imaginary concept, but humanity is enslaved by it - page 13. (Read 17723 times)

Well I think it certainly would, but I can see your point.

The money is a must because people need some kind of value token to do the trade, it should have universal acceptance, so fiat money is the closest candidate. It is this definite demand for transaction medium give fiat money value, and no matter how heavy the slavery is, people will still use it, since they don't have other choice

However, if people managed to produce some other universally accepted value certificate, then that can be used as money, so bitcoin is really creating a new alternative

What a sad world would it be, it would basically mean that human cooperation is not anymore required.

Making money is sadly seen as shameful is my country, because it means that "we eat too much of the pie, that is unfair".
But when we think about it, money is the only force that make us act for the well being of strangers without being compelled to do so.
Money is the reward for being helpful to someone else, this is often forgotten.

Well, I don't think we should blame people for that, I must admit that this definition is not very legit in today's world.
The definition of money has been corrupted, not because of "society" or "mankind" greediness, but by the very persons who defined themselves as sacred arbiters of value on behalf of the society.

In today's world, production capacity is just like the demand for money, is almost infinite. With more money invested, there will be more goods and services produced, to make inflation in check, or even trigger deflation, due to more products and non-changing demand

As soon as there is some profitable goods, money will flow in like flood and mass produce those goods immediately. We have seen such kind of dramatic change in industry landscape of bitcoin ASIC miner. It is jaw dropping that during a very short time of 2 years, all the last several generations of semiconductor processing node has been passed and now we are tapping the newest processing nodes which are still in laboratory phase

So it seems no matter how much money is printed, there will be corresponding goods/services generated quickly. But the problem is on the ownership: All those newly created money belongs to some private banks, they give nothing in exchange for those money. That created a loophole in the financial system, so that banks will eventually claim everything's ownership by just printing money

Indeed, the concept of money has been around for thousands of years, and after the society split into many specialized industry branch, money as a universal transaction medium facilitate trades between people, people don't know how to live without it, it is like air and water

Maybe someday in future, when everyone could produce everything they want with the help of a robot, trade will become unnecessary, then money will disappear. But due to human's limited life time, specialization is very possible to extend further, thus money will never disappear

If money is always needed, then the best we can do is to make sure it distributed based on the fair trade principle: Market decide its value and its cost is close to its face value

I've heard the claim that infinite demand for money allows increased supply without triggering inflation, but it's usually used to justify money printing, so that's an interesting idea. However, both sides miss something important when using this argument: The supply of goods and services doesn't change as a result of a higher money supply (although a higher money supply can temporarily drive increased production). The more dollars there are chasing limited goods, the less it is worth.

It doesn't matter if society realizes this is happening, they do understand on some level or another that buying power is falling when prices rise.

You can't really blame banks here though. Fractional reserve banking is, as you say, a natural phenomenon, but, at least so long as there are reserve requirements (either by fiat or necessity--to maintain solvency), private banks can only *multiply* real currency, not mint infinite new currency. The amount of real currency created by central banks directly controls the money supply, therefore, central banks *over the long term* are always to blame for inflation.

Lol.  Wouldn't it be cool to see a documentary on human beings, just observing behaviour with no basic assumptions?  Narrated by David Attenborough of course.


I haven't been a fan of the Keynesian system because like many other theories, it only works properly (to benefit the general population rather than a selective/elite group) with a benevolent government that has no self-interest.  So with a responsible government, it would work a lot better, but with the current style of government, it just gives way too much power to a few people, which is constantly exploited at the cost of avg Joe.  All the wars that we've had in the past few decades....would it be possible without a Keynesian system?  The speculation and asset bubbles?

So far, I only see libertarians wanting to move away from Keynesian economics, and they don't have a realistic chance at being elected.

Interesting.
Are you familiar with the publications of John Keynes? I bet you you'd love his ideas.

However I think this topic is more of a philosophical issue and it's not about money after all. But it's about human nature with its constant growing greed.

Or maybe because it's printing too much.

Now, how could we live without money? If I go to a restaurant without money, how do I pay? Or would they feed me for free? Free beer, too?

If alien come to earth, they will be shocked by the fact that human on earth will starve just because money printer is not working

True, those theories about money are always correct under a monopole monetary system, because people have no other choice but believe whatever they say, and they can always find an explanation for what happened and what they plan to do. But now we have a totally different monetary system built on bitcoin, we can try and see if those theories are correct

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DwYo21LTK4

Here's a 3 min video on measures/symbols and compares money vs. wealth, by (IMO) an incredible philosopher by the name of Alan Watts.  I'm not sure what the forum rules are around posting videos - there is an ad on the video unfortunately, but I'm not affiliated with the uploader.  It's just a clip from a much longer lecture which you can search for.

Anyways, he is great at questioning basic assumptions that normally go unquestioned as we grow up and become conditioned to our particular society.  Money is one of those basic assumptions, that even though it's one of the most important things to understand in today's world, the average population a) doesn't have a very good understanding of it and b) accepts that level of ignorance and doesn't feel the need to learn.

I live in Toronto, and through elementary school, high school there is very little in terms of learning about the monetary system and money.  I went to what is considered a top business school in the country and specialized in Finance, and still other than learning about financial/economic theories and concepts, there wasn't much in terms of learning about money or the monetary system.  That was skipped as an assumption that everyone already understands it.

The learning unfortunately, comes outside of the education system (at least from my experience), with personal interest and research.  I'm interested to know whether anyone here has learned anything about money, monetary policy, central banks, the history of fiat money, and maybe the history of American currency over time and the different systems they had in place, how they changed from being backed by gold, partially backed by gold, not backed by anything, etc.?  It seems important to know for anyone that uses money, which is everyone.

Indeed good questions. I think it is about a saturated market. Difficult to deal with

50 years ago,  when people are still relatively poor and had lots of demand, you need to accelerate the production to fulfill those demands, and productivity can not increase dramatically overnight, so you need lots of people involved to speed up the production

But now when almost everything is done, existing production capacity can satisfy the demand, and it is constantly increasing in efficiency, as a result, more and more people are laid off

The demand is still there, it is even more. However, production are centralized to a few multinational enterprises, the supply is not done by millions of people collectively, but by only a few thousand people. It is this concentration of production removed many people's income, so that even they have strong demand, they can not consume due to no income

Those enterprises first made huge profit, then start to get worse, since their potential customer do not have enough income, that reduced their sale. And when they have less sale, they will fire more people, worsen the situation

So you have to find a new demand area that can absorb those excessive labor force and give them enough income to restart the economy. Unfortunately, it seems most of human's demand are just fulfilled. When I go to a super market, I'm always amazed by so many things that seems useless

So far, as part of the solution, government can borrow a lot of money to run large construction projects, could be long term and expensive projects like a bridge from Florida to Cuba  

Those projects will never generate any meaningful return, so it will just be a huge expense, created millions of jobs for a while, but since government can borrow money endlessly, this is not a big deal

Maybe in future, 90% of people will be participating this kind of government projects, like researching new robot, new medicine, new power plant, new base on Mars...

Debt is the real problem ? lol

As I said, the problem is the people not the money. If tomorrow I want to print 100 dollars I can't , isn't it? I didn't choose this economic system, and I will fight until the death.

The economic history of the world reveals that division of labor leads to increased productivity with each technological paradigm shift (through deeper utilization of resources), but at the same time requires more and more people with ever narrowing specialization. Therefore your fears are mostly unfounded...

It's going to take what, 1% of the population to maintain and make those machines. What is the rest of people going to do? most people will simply not be needed in the future, including us.. but maybe we are all dead by then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_JkazmhSpE says all.

In fact, the only reason why we (actually, producers) simplify these tasks is to make more profit by introducing more efficient production. Though I agree in general, the end result is essentially the same, i.e. we move from less interesting tasks to more interesting ones...

Well not really, someone must make those machines. Someone must maintain those machines. The only reason we simplify these tasks is to move on to other tasks.