I’ve been watching this series from BBC, starring Niall Ferguson as host, on Google for the past couple of weeks. It’s incredibly fascinating, and I highly recommend it to everyone. Why? Well, because you agree to trade your effort in life for “money,” so you should have some idea of what you’re agreeing to. Shouldn’t you?
Essentially, money, or “cash,” came about as a means of representing some other thing or value. Instead of having to go trade your chickens to the milk-man for some milk, because the shoe-maker didn’t want chickens, but he would take milk, you could just trade him “cash,” which was good for shoes, chickens, or milk.
At some point, the idea of a loan or debt came into being, where someone said “I can’t pay you now, but you know I’m good for it.” The person lending the money agreed, and gave the borrower what they wanted…with interest, of course.
Money, “cash,” plus the concept of loans/debt/credit, gave way to bonds, when the Rothschilds showed that fortunes could be made by buying low and selling high. But bonds, because they represent potential “cash,” set the value of interest rates, and the rate of inflation.
More people began to play in the bond market, strengthening its foothold in economic systems. This creates a vicious cycle, where governments use bonds to raise more money, based on the fact that more people are invested in bonds. The global market for bonds is larger than all of the world’s stock markets put together.
In the final analysis, money, the way we agree to trade value internationally – and all of its machinations, are so intertwined in the structure of global society (or any individual society), that changing that method of trade would radically change everything else.
Anyone who makes money (who trades their value-creation for a standard, or globally-accepted representation of that value) would have to wonder where they would stand.
That is, it would require, as Nietzsche said about morals and ethics – “a transvaluation of values.”
But is this possible? Or likely? What sort of catastrophe would have to occur to cause people to “wake up” to their value system…a la Neo getting unplugged from the Matrix?
I don’t know.
