Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Theory of Money

Greetings good citizen,

How long do you suppose it will be before the Stock Market is outlawed? You know it isn’t going to happen as long as the imbeciles currently running things remain in charge so perhaps it is better to ask how long do you think it will be before the proverbial ‘other shoe drops’?

As I have long asserted good citizen, plotting the economic future of our civilization is somewhat akin to tap dancing on a land mine as the wise Jesse points out.

There is too much ‘bullshit’ being passed off as economic fact.

Why? Because the fucktards ‘broke’ the economy and don’t know how to fix it (without bankrupting their masters, which would prove fatal for them.)

Sadly for the rest of us good citizen, they broke ‘our’ economy while they were at it.

Um, the future’s not looking too bright from where brother Jesse is sitting and you KNOW I’m not about to gainsay him.

The lesson (one of many) to be taken from this sorry set of circumstances is how ‘prosperity’ is not possible under an ‘unregulated’ environment (That the fucking Republican’s keep championing) Nobody will ‘do the right thing’ if they don’t absolutely have to.

How much stronger does the case for regulation need to be?

More interesting is this article from today’s Alternet newsletter that explores something the public is largely ignorant of, the ‘history’ of money:

Time for a New Theory of Money

The concept of money-as-a-commodity can be traced back to the use of precious metal coins. Gold is widely claimed to be the oldest and most stable currency known, but this is not actually true. Money did not begin with gold coins and evolve into a sophisticated accounting system. It began as an accounting system and evolved into the use of precious metal coins. [snip]


I apologize for the interruption good citizen but here is historic ‘proof’ that the ‘money of account’ system utilized in ‘A Simple Plan’ is ‘tried and true’!

It’s easy to understand how ‘money you can hold on to’ gained widespread acceptance but in doing so, you have gotten fucked royally! (Because the ‘value’ of hard cash remains…’fluid’, and you aren’t the one who gets to decide.) Anyway:

Money as a “unit of account” (a tally of sums paid and owed) predated money as a “store of value” (a commodity or thing) by two millennia; the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations using these accounting-entry payment systems lasted not just hundreds of years (as with some civilizations using gold) but thousands of years. Their bank-like ancient payment systems were public systems—operated by the government the way that courts, libraries, and post offices are operated as public services today.


Wasn’t I just pointing out the other day how what was old is now new again? (In the context of ‘economizing’ by doing more for yourself, thus ‘saving money’ although this plan sucks because it ‘assumes’ you have the resources to do for yourself, and you don’t!)

Shift mental gears back to the current slow motion train wreck that is our civilization.

Maybe I should take a moment to belabor the obvious, that A. is intrinsically tied to B.

The economy ‘croaks’, civilization goes down the tubes with it.

No irony should be lost on the fact that civilization ALWAYS collapses first…

What am I yapping about?

How’s this for a badly broken legal system? Bad enough that MERS (the electronic mortgage registry system) has fouled up the ‘chain of custody’ which proves ownership around the world but the ‘fallout’ of this foul up is people who DON’T EVEN HAVE MORTGAGES are having their houses seized by banks!

This particular article is NOT on that topic but the related subject of people who aren’t delinquent on their mortgage payments having their property foreclosed upon anyway…

Did I mention criminals?

While not all Republicans are criminals, most criminals are Republicans…the ones who aren’t are Pirates, which is to say ‘apolitical’. The only law they recognize comes from the barrel of a gun.

So avast there, Matey! You have Pirates looking to plunder your booty…hell of a time to discover ‘you’re on your own!’

Which is ‘how’ things fall apart, not only is nobody enforcing the rules but nobody is obeying them either.

Which is nothing compared to the ‘whiplash’ everybody experiences when ‘strictly enforced’ (abruptly and sporadically) resumes…

This is the ‘nightmare’ of no government, when the ‘warlord of the moment’ takes it into his/her head to mete out punishment for crimes both real AND imagined.

A nightmare that continues until the warlord becomes a footnote in the history books and a new warlord takes over and a whole new nightmare begins!

We all ‘value’ the rule of law (while it lasts.) No irony should be lost that it is the criminals themselves who miss the rule of law the most once it disappears!

There’s nothing more comforting than knowing with a reasonable degree of certainty precisely where the boundaries are.

Once the rule of law is supplanted by the ‘rule of man’, all bets are off.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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