A long time ago we used sea shells as currency. When I say we, I really mean in a very all-inclusive sense WE. In Africa, Asia, North America, and the Pacific there's ample evidence it was the dollar du jour. In the absence of intercontinental communication, and any inherent use, small shells were monetized.
It's important we remember what money is. We live in a time when empty homes fall into disrepair as the homeless are harassed of the streets and off our streets. We live in a time when some talk about the lazy jobless while the jobless are working full time jobs to just FIND someone who will exchange cash for service. There are sick who go untreated, and children who go undernourished and uneducated. The striking thing about all this is that there are those in need, and things that need doing, where we have the resources to provide and the will to act. But we do not.
I have a vision. I see a man who owns all the wealth of the world. He has done his homework, talked to the right people, and after his work is done, he has every dollar, euro, and reminbi in the world. He pays everyone for their services, and everyone buys at the company store. Then, one day, he withdraws from his accounts. Markets crash. Banks collapse. All debt is worthless. He takes the irrefutable representations of that wealth, whether they are trillion dollar bills, or whatever. He throws it in a big pile. He turns the worldwide media's cameras on the pile. And as the world sits in rapt attention he burns it and walks away.
I'd like to believe the world would look on the event with indifference. A few burned pieces of paper can burn and leave the world unchanged. But a certain madness affects all of us, a madness that sees much where there is little. Today I see a microcosm of such a silly catastrophe. In the midst of a deflationary debt cycle, where wages fall as debts stay constant, and the ensuing defaults trigger the creation of more thoroughly irredeemable debt, those who can tell people to stop working, and those who can throw people out of their homes.
Let me give it straight: we have no reason to listen to these assholes. None.
It's important that we remember that money, fundamentally, is an agreement. We don't need the story of the evolution of money. But we all know that instead of a 'I scratch your back and you'll scratch mine,' approach, we have a complicated world where I scratch someone else's back. He gives me a shell to signify I've done some back-scratching, and then later I use that shell to get someone completely different to scratch my back for me. In short money is the medium by which we entitle one another to help.
A thriving economy is one where we're all working for each other. No one's left out, all capable hands are doing everything that needs doing, and we can go about our lives in the communal happiness that comes with that much vitality and mutual generosity. But today, a large number of people just don't have any money. They don't have the right to help. At the same time mostly the same group of people are told they aren't allowed to ask for any either.
You see, it turns our our Job Creators don't need anything. They don't need you to fix their house or educate their kids. They have all of that taken care of. Billionaires want for NOTHING.
When we take such a large portion of our cash and put it all into the hands of a few, what we're really doing is holding over control of how our country is run, how our lives are run. And when they do just great whether or not the rest of us are being thrown in the shitter, they just don't care. Because, outside of the goodness of their hearts, we don't give them a reason to care.
Our Job Creators talk about incentives a lot. They incentivize employees, the unemployed, the the consumer, they pull and tug at prices and behavior-based discounts and consumer-specific coupons. When you take out a contract for ANYTHING these days, whether it's for internet access or whatever, you're forced to hand over your rights. Your right to privacy, your right to buy a competitor's product, your right to your own money. Why? Because there aren't any incentives in the other direction. Barack talks about giving Job Creators 'incentives' to create jobs by increasing their already bloated purses. Why should we beg of the few with bags of cash for the right to a job? Why should we stand idly by and defer all control over our lives to apathetic oligarchs? It's time to remove their hold over our lives and our economy.
The method's democracy, and I've got a good start:
1) Take control of our central bank. Have them STOP lending to banks and lend directly to citizens. In the event of a horrible recession like ours, make those loans at NEGATIVE interest rates to get our economy moving again.
2) Take control of contract law: make it literally illegal for any contract, not merely government contracts, to deprive people of their constitutional rights.
3) Give employees equal voting rights with shareholders.
When we don't actually need them to get out there and get our country back to work, some few men with an inexplicable number of back-scratch tokens. Well. Then we'll be a democracy again. We'll be working again, and living with the plenty we can provide one another.
Inject some democracy into the equation. Through liberty equality, and through equality prosperity.
Only problem is, if history's any guide, and we're actually going to make a difference, a lot of us are likely to get shot. Long live MLK!