We have, as a society, lost track of what money represents and worship bank accounts that are meaningless if our government is truly representative of the people. In a perfect capitalist system the Walton family would not make $100 million per day and corporations would be social/private co-operatives that are legally bound to responsibility for all “stakeholders”, not just shareholders.
Money is a product of law, not a “thing” that should be stored. It denominates transactions and contracts to give some order to commerce, but its utility is only valuable when it changes hands. It is created by the government and destroyed by the government, hopefully with some semblance of reason and greater purpose. Our one big mistake was enabling money to multiply via interest outside of normal commerce and beyond the reach of the government’s control.
There should be no private banking when Congress is given the monopoly authority to create the nation’s currency and mandated to do so for “the general welfare”. The US dollar has always been a fiat currency, and only artificial constructs, such as the gold standard, have produced the mistaken illusion that it is finite and the monopoly “issuer” must somehow “find” it to enable spending on the public purpose.
This has led to the ability of the wealthy to dominate the lives of others to their own whims and purposes. As long as we make the wealthy relevant to our society they will continue to do so. By demanding that Congress fulfill its Constitutional mandate to create and distribute currency to the people, not reliant upon banking and private sector commerce to shape the economy, we empower it to regulate and tax wealth whenever it threatens the rights of any citizen without concern for “revenue” or property rights.
Wealth is not property, and the currency is nothing more than a tax credit which the issuing government always maintains monopoly control over. This makes “any” suffering that can be mitigated with dollars entirely a political decision, not economics. The federal government can afford anything that is for sale denominated in dollars, including the excess labor the private sector rejects. It should always be the employer of last resort and set a standard of a livable wage and benefits for the private sector. This pins the economy to the hour of work, replacing capital as the price setter.
