Thursday, January 29, 2009

Money supply, and, money as paper

I'm not denying that money is a potent force. But even if money itself is so powerful (ha ha - little pieces of paper, or worse yet, nothing - are powerful? That sounds like some kind of joke) there are logically speaking, two things you can do with it: put more in or take more out. Money itself is a thing we should always question in a fundamental way.

In the largest sense, then, money has this twofold quality of being both very powerful and of being really very similar to a joke or to being just nothing at all. We should not forget this later aspect: the illusory, fictive side of its nature.

Once we attain this kind of balance in our understanding we can look -- in a reserved, conditional and suspicious way -- at money's apparent power. But if it has this power, the quandry is of what to do. Take it out? Put it in? Redistro? Move it around? That could make a good pop song.

one final comment: conservative will probably suggest that we neither put some in nor take some out but that the money supply should just be fixed and should remain stabilized more or less. This kind of fiscal conservatism was refuted of course by Keynes. But no one was doing that in any case, so it seems like an irrelevant thing to say. Capitalists are generally going to use all of the power they can get from money. Bankers make money from loaning out money, and, from what I understand, they just invent money sometimes in order to make these loans. If these reports are true it seems natural that eventually they could not be repaid, and, at the same time, for an incredibly long time they could be repaid just enough to keep the insane, greedy selfish system going.

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