Money can be converted into the practical resources that the people in need will value.
Yes, and then we can give them real resources they can use. Most of what they need to advance their societies will be priced in some currency other than what they can create anyway.
Even if I didn’t express it well, we are pretty much on the same page. My default view of everything is macroeconomic.
Despite the upsides of living closer to the earth, there are still a lot of people starving, or dying of malaria, or HIV, or are unable to treat simple medical conditions, and I doubt anyone is enjoying that part. There’s no good reason to ignore it.
Just to clarify: Are we still talking about developing countries, or the US? Conflating “money” with resources has made us remarkably similar to those countries over the last few decades. We forget that we have an infinite supply of money and allow others to convince us it is finite, and in short supply. There is no shortage of medicines in most cases to justify extreme price increases, but because the consumer is no longer the price setter the old supply/demand dynamics no longer work, especially when the only option is death.
Also, a significant portion of the poorest people are not living in rural agrarian societies, they are in cities. And they probably have more options for spending whatever money comes their way.
You’d be surprised how much of that is deliberate and our fault. With a fiat currency, we can subsidize any product we wish to for export. We always manage to sell other countries their staple food product, except we do it at prices the domestic farmers can’t compete with, or simply give it to them. This, along with our technology, drives farmers into the cities where they are available as cheap labor.
This paves the way for future labor sources as the current ones increase labor cost due to increased economic growth and living standards. I have no problem with seeding modern economies, but when we do it for increased profit there is little incentive to spend on those who are damaged by the practice.
I think the main point of my article is intact: people think it’s OK to hoard ridiculous amounts of money when it could be doing a lot of good for a lot of others.
I agree. People who hoard more of other stuff they’ll never use are actually called hoarders and usually, someone sends them to therapy. When you obsessively hoard money you are highly revered and may even get elected President. Money sitting in their bank accounts presents no hazard as long as it is replaced in the economy with new issues and it isn’t used to influence our democratic process.
However, as I said above, money is not in any shortage unless it is forced to be with poor fiscal policy. Money isn’t even a thing that we can have a shortage in. It’s a unit of measure, like the score of a football game. One never worries about a stadium running out of points to award teams that play there. Congress, Treasury, and the Federal Reserve are the scorekeepers and the dollar is the point system.
They are not willing to become smaller in order to lift up their fellow people. I think this myopic selfishness is an artifact of evolution which now acts like a cancer in the human organism, and needs to end.
There is a “type” of person that seems to be dominant among the wealthy. One could consider it a mental disorder to be so fearful of ever being without that hoarding the currency consumes them. To them, the currency only gives them comfort if it is viewed as a physical thing which they control. In truth, the currency and its distribution is a product of law and contracts that the currency-issuing sovereign government will always control. That has to drive the wealthy nuts, and is why they have a dislike for their own government.
Governments need to be able to accumulate resources and hire labor, as well as maintain an army without any real revenue stream. They do this by imposing a tax, or taxes, that is only payable in the currency they control and can create at will. This creates a condition of unemployment in the population until it gathers the currency needed to pay the tax. Then the government spends its currency into the economy to provision itself, which draws real resource into the economy to be available on demand.
The currency-issuing government never actually “needs” its own currency back, being able to produce it at will (fiat), but it does need “us” to need its currency. If it spends more into the economy than it demands back in taxes it offers a store of value and a way to denominate trade and contracts which organizes the economy around its currency.
It can then use its issuing power (Article 1: Section 8 of our constitution) and taxation to generally control the economy and invest in future growth with infrastructure, educating the workforce, and providing for the “general welfare” to avoid uprisings and revolutions which would occur if it only spent what it taxed and the people quickly figure out that the money is just a way to steal resources.
The wealthy have never “funded” our government because they need the government to fund them and leave them far more than they are taxed. In a democratic society, the only way to achieve this is to gain the support of the voting populace to avoid the election of authorities unfriendly to them. Because the majority of those voters gain their share of the currency through the exchange of their labor with the wealthy, it is quite easy to use jobs and wages to pervert the perception of the source of their share and posit themselves as that source (job creators) and the government as a “cost” to their ability to pay more or create more jobs that should be given no more authority than is minimally necessary to maintain an army and police force.
Anything else the government might provide to benefit the voters must be reviled as a debt that the people will be responsible for paying, even though it actually represents only an accounting of money created into the private sector that hasn’t been recalled by taxation. As long as a majority of the voters believe that taxation “funds” their government, the reverse of reality, they will serve as a volunteer voting force to prevent any “others” (welfare queens) from gaining from government spending and the society will form a strong association with meritocracy to justify its cruelty.
That will inevitably result in racism/tribalism/nationalism and eventually devolve into fascism as the wealthy privatize every aspect of society to gain more wealth. One of the primary tools used to promote this reverse perception is the Treasury Bond, originally purposed to offer a secure store of value from commerce and a floor for investors with the backing of the government. It is now seen as a means of “borrowing” by the government to fund its spending above tax collections.
The government can never “borrow” what it hasn’t yet created, but that is lost on the general population that conflates the federal budget with their own household budget as “users” of the currency. A simple revision in the Federal Reserve Act mandated that the government issue bonds to “match” (not fund) any deficit spending, presenting the illusion that the government must “find” money to spend, either via taxation or debt. Bond revenue, like taxes, are balanced to zero by the debt as soon as they enter the government sector, so cannot fund anything.
In truth, the US government can afford anything that is potentially available and for sale priced in dollars, including any excess labor the private sector rejects, as it is the monopoly patent holder of the dollar. This makes any misery in the economy, which is too often transferred to other economies via trade or war, entirely a political decision, not economics, that only serves to maintain the dominance of wealth in direct violation of government’s constitutional mandate to create currency “for the common welfare”.
This is a rough overview of modern money in today’s world. I hope it helps you better understand the motivations and mechanics of our monetary system and currency. The best way to deal with the wealthy is simply to make them irrelevant to achieving any goals we set for our nation and fully fund those goals with the nation’s currency. When we figure out we don’t need their money we can then get them the help they need and tax the bejebus out of them to prevent them from doing mischief.
