Financial Discord

So how are we going to shed ourselves of this money stuff?

I think it’s about time we did.

Money was a good idea. It meant that you could facilitate asset exchange and trade across boundaries and time and it was enormously flexible. If you’ll excuse the expression, everyone bought into the system, and we’ve built the modern world with it.

Well done everyone.

Things have started to go a bit sour with the tool. That’s all it is. Money is a tool, and from being something we use to build, learn, exchange and develop ourselves, it has started to hold us back, to constrain us.
This isn’t an anti-capitalist tirade, or a plea to be let off any personal debts I have – it is merely an observation that the thing that we invented to help us out, to ease the passage of assets from one owner to another, has begun to hold us, as a species, back.

How so?

I’ll get to that in a minute. First I’m going to have a crack at vocalising a nagging thought I’ve had since someone told me about making money.
Okay.
Money passes from one body to the next, in exchange for goods or services.
If that body is an individual, that individual can buy at one price and sell at a higher price. After the transactions, that individual is in possession of more money than he or she had to begin with.
(Stay with me here)

Extend the definition of ‘a body’. Take a company. A company buys things or pays people, carries out some process, and sells on that product or service at a higher value. The company increases the amount of money in its possession. Fine.

Take the world. Spinning in space...
This is too far, you say. Money doesn’t work out here.
Fair enough.

Let’s take a goal of a few of the more vocal global politicians – the elimination of poverty...with the silent subtitle - without redistributing wealth.
Everyone getting richer? Where is this money coming from?
Space?

Don’t ask me – I’m an engineer.

We are doing great things down here people – our tools are getting really quite good. Technology is whooping some serious backside. We are pushing back the boundaries of what we know to be possible and learning on the way. We’re fiddling around with the very stuff of life, we are creating new species, opening doors for creativity and the arts that previous generations never dreamed of, and to be honest, as a species, we’re feeling pretty smug right now.
True?

Something is beginning to restrict us though. At the moment the restriction isn’t openly noticeable, and we are finding a few ways around it. That’s what we do. We adapt. We’ve gotten quite good at it.

That restriction is money.
Imagine what we as a species would be capable of if there were no financial constraints on anything. If we set ourselves to something and didn’t hold back a single damned thing.
We can’t go to Mars. It is too expensive.
We can’t feed the world. There isn’t enough money.

It isn’t economically viable.

I hate that phrase.

The thought that we are capable of something beautiful, something staggeringly beneficial, something amazing and good, but can’t do it because of a self-imposed restriction...how sick does that make you feel?

Money runs the world – both ways – it makes it possible, but it also controls it.

Our attitude to money seems to reflect our maturity as a species. We might do better than we think without it, but we’ll not try.

I think there is an energy-based global economy somewhere in the future, but we’ll only switch to it when we need to.

And then we’ll adapt to it.

RIP, Concorde.