Woke up this morning with a good idea. Then I forgot it in reviewing the over-night news, including Paul Krugman's new essay on the effects of joblessness. I had to respond and point out that the percentage of U.S. adults in the paid labor force is the same now as it was when the majority of women did not get paid for their work. Somebody obviously likes the idea of having reserves to call on.
Anyway, I think the idea I had came in association with the phrase "risk-free monopoly," which looks like something the Cons would come up with, but, I think, isn't actually in use. No-risk and monopoly are, in a sense, redundant, except that the Cons' fear is pretty much constant. They feel themselves at risk even when they are not, perhaps because the monopoly they achieve is based on force, not talent -- coerced, rather than granted. So, a risk-free monopoly is an ideal--one which normally inventive people would find boring.
Come to think of it, accumulation and hoarding, the signature behaviors of the rich, are also basically boring. Accumulating money, aside from money being easy to steal, is for the lazy. Because most people, if they have more money than they need, don't really care about giving it away. Perhaps that's why the myth has to be maintained. If truth be known, the filthy rich would have to admit to stupidity to boot.
This line of thinking was probably spurred by my running across a National Geographic Documentary on "America's Money Vault," which seems designed to bolster the myth that gold is still central to the economy. So far, I haven't been able to watch the whole thing, and not just because the ads are so annoying.
If there's a more worthless endeavor than grubbing a mineral out of the ground and poisoning the environemnt and the miners with arsenic to do it, so it can be "refined" and processed and formed into bricks to store in a vault underground, I wouldn't know what it is. It's a secular mythology served up by gnomes. The narator says gold is the perfect money because it's easy to recycle. That's only half right. The perfect money is easy to recycle (if there's a recycling program -- taxation), but gold is too heavy to make it easy. Also, since it is a soft metal, it is easy to "shave" or "clip." Dollars are better--pure trust; no glitter.
Currency is a risk-free monopoly. It is also boring. However, that obviously doesn't deter the accumulaters from acquiring and trying to hoard it. Indeed, that it's boring may be what attracts them. If they can't be deterred, can we provide a substitute. If we let them hoard gold, will they let our dollar bills go?