Money
Okay, so this is a case of Fay and I giving each other ideas. Basically, something I was reading and telling her about made her think of how she does pacts with her deities, and then she got this thought about "divine money" that was pre-charged with attention (food of the gods), with their names on and such, to be redeemed later
( Read more... )
You've got the idea of money half right. Money is essentially book-keeping. scorekeeping if you will.
The things you deplore are not a function of money. They are a function of the power structures.
Money doesn't represent time. No more than it represents work (a common claim of communist types).
It represents "value" which is a highly subjective thing.
The value of an hour of your time (or an hour of your work) depends on how valuable *to others* the result of that hour is.
Which is why different jobs have different pay scales *and* why different people doing the "same" job get different pay.
Alas, we do have folks who are way too good at gaming the system (some CEOs may be worth quite a bit, others are gaming the system by making it better to pay them huge amounts than to have them leave to work elsewhere).
That's not quite blackmail, but the spirit may be similar.
Maybe a better example is real estate prices in Tokyo. They are insanely high. The land isn't actually worth that much, but companies bidding things up have driven them to those levels. And now nobody dares question things because those inflated values are part of their company's assets and if they got valued properly, it'd be a major hit in the company's net worth.
So all continues until some day something happens and the house of cards comes falling down. When it does, the results will be ugly. As bad as the banking/real estate mess we had here.
Capitalism works fairly well. But we've got *crony* capitalism, which only works well for the "cronies".
Reply
Leave a comment