Quote:
Originally Posted by schola  jaamkie,
There are other ways of getting your cow right now other than borrowing money for it, but I'll go over that some other time.
Just know that money isn't real. I mean, truly and totally understand that fact. It's not real. When you really "get" that, it will feel like your brain just blew up.
I used to think that "gold is money," and if you know about Austrian economics and follow Ron Paul is you might know what I mean by that, but now I realize that's a falsehood. Gold functions pretty when it represents money, but it is not money, because money isn't real.
Money is just a concept. It's a symbol. A meme. A piece of language. That's it.
If back in the old days you borrowed "money" from the bank, you were really borrowing gold coins. The "interest" on that "money" was really just your obligation to bring the banker more gold coins. Just like the apples and the cows in my other example.
I mean usury as the charging of any interest on the loaning of money. I don't like to pay for being loaned unreal things.
The problem I see with usury is that it creates a potentially unlimited obligation; meaning: the sky's the limit on how much you could potentially "owe." It increases exponentially. You owe more and more and more until you either 1) get it paid off or 2) get in over your head.
Money is truly infinite but whatever we attach it to isn't. That's the deception.
In our scenario, there are only a finite amount of coins in the world, but your possible debt is infinite. Theoretically, you could "owe" more coins than all the coins that exist. Trust me, it's designed this way.
The plot thickens when you discover that the banks control the supply of gold coins and they can make it very hard to pay off your debt to them by restricting the supply of coins.
This is turning into a condemnation of banking in general. But you should know that usury is just one facet of the whole banking scam.
On a side note, just consider this. Have you ever loaned a friend money at interest? I haven't. What kind of friend would do that? Banks aren't your friend. |
The fact that money isn't real IS THE WHOLE POINT!!! If it were a real physical thing, yes I could understand why one would complain that there's only a limited amount of "gold coins"; but since it is a representation of value to society, there is no theoretical limit on the total amount of money that can
or should exist.
The point of loaning at interest is that society exists over time, at any point in time we are consuming value as well as creating it, and the economy- based on the exchange of money- is the system for efficiently distributing/balancing creation and consumption of value.
If we consume more than we create, we are depleting our resources- exploiting them unsustainably; while if we create more than we consume, we are generating savings- assets for the future. (Of course currently not everything of value is included in our monetary system- we don't properly value our natural resources/environment- hence unsustainable exploitation/pollution...)
So in designing our economy, we want society as a whole to create more value than it consumes- hence money creation is tied to expectations of repayment with interest. We expect that utilization of current value in society should lead to greater creation of value in the future. (In reality yes there is no way to
force someone to be productive; however our systems seem to usually coerce most people to contribute most of the time- and the better we can do that, the more efficiency we can get out of people, the higher average standard-of-living we will achieve as time passes.)
This is why many people such as myself, while appreciating interest in the real sense, are angered by the use of credit/loans for consumption rather than investment- loans
should be structured to be paid off over time,
should only be made when there is a reasonable expectation that they will be used to generate income in the future. If they don't follow these rules, then yes they are really gifts/charity/shams and ought to be called such, instead of this bizarre fantasy that people will conjure value out of nothing after maxing out credit cards and home equity loans to just consume. (and I blame both the consumers and society/governance for the fact that many people seem unable to generate enough income to sustainably pay as they go)
And I do understand that at a basic level, the Fed only creates money along with the expectation that it will receive more money back than it has created- which duh is impossible. But there is no final reckoning, no day of judgement; and as you said, money IS NOT REAL- it is a collective fantasy to represent the total value available to society for consumption. Also as you said, a cow
does naturally increase in value if managed appropriately (though in a larger way we are all ultimately dependent on energy from the sun; but as they say "in the long run we're all dead"), so we create money mirroring this reality- we only create money if the recipient expects that they will use that value from society to generate additional value(money) in the future.
---
The point of "friendship" is that you reciprocate gifts/favors due to a slowly-developed bilateral trust... you loan without interest out of trust that the favor will be remembered and reciprocated. Obviously this doesn't scale, and we need a system to allow fair loans despite no previous contact- hence the concept of interest and contracts and a judicial system to enforce them.
And I am curious how you plan to get your cow without any prior assests (including intangible assets such as personal relationships or reputation) and without any obligations (explicit or implicit) of repayment beyond the cow itself to compensate someone for the time and risk of giving you the cow?