Money Ruins Everything – Alex Derden

This year (2019) the US Government is going to have a deficit (money they need and don’t have) of over $1T…. that’s a lot of power, and if you believe that money is power, then I hope this quote sends a cold chill down your spine and illustrates how incredibly dangerous such a system of concentrated power might be. This is the corruption that the protesters around the world feel like they are fighting against. They might not know it yet, but they’re protesting against the financial system…a global financial system that’s stretching them to their limits. ( https://academeblog.org/2017/02/01/visualizing-a-billion-and-a-trillion-dollars/)

Since the world markets have been linked, so too have the world currencies…although not equally so. The USD still maintains it’s status as the world reserve currency. This means that dollars (and other currencies that are held by world super-powers) are inherently more valuable than they would be otherwise. So what?

If USD are more valuable than other currencies and especially those currencies in smaller less powerful countries the increase in supply of the USD would have an immediate and pronounced effect on those countries’ buying power…which in turn would erode the ability of the people in those countries to support themselves…it would feel like they were subject to an unjust/unfair system.

In addition to this oversimplified summary of the financial problems there are other side effects that you may have noticed. In such a system where there was a lot of funny money (debt) created the centralization of government/companies would be accelerated…basically any activity that has an economic benefit would be accelerated to a point that it’s obviously unhealthy.

In the 16th century the Chinese began using opium for medicinal purposes. The country’s addiction grew so much that between the 17th and 19th centuries the opium epidemic caused two Wars in which the companies serving the addiction (they were responsible for the transportation of the drugs) became so powerful that they were able to use military force to ensure they were able to continue their ‘trade’. It seems Big Pharma is also prescribing more and more opiods in the US…does that seem healthy to you?

If that’s not enough to worry you, virtually every aspect of our lives has been affected by some perversion of the market. Our houses are so expensive that we’d need 30 years to pay them off (15 year mortgages used to be the norm), and often that’s not enough time. Our food has been systematically engineered to be easy to produce and to make us hungry…a hungry customer is a repeat customer. According to the world’s scientists climate change is a real problem, and a by-product of our need to grow that food as quickly as possible and to transport it (and other goods) around the planet. Fresh banana anyone?

So can’t we just decentralize everything and fix it? The protesters are already using smart phones to organize themselves and make decisions. Yes but…that might be difficult if you wanted to make a new law, or to fund the police force to enact it….decentralization won’t fix everything. In my opinion, what these protesters want is a republic. They want to feel like they’re being fairly and accurately represented by the people in power. Ideally the ‘district’ of each representative would be small enough that they could be considered tribes…not stretching so far that the representative would have to make accessions to appease one section or group of her district, and even that person’s influence could be fluid…increasing if they gained support in an adjoining district or decreasing if they voted in a way that was unfavorable to their voters.

The question of governance is not new. Modern technology does however make even complex systems traceable and verifiable…if such a system can be developed, maintained and incentivized. As we’ve seen… the current systems of money are no longer serving the people. Crypto-currency has lots of potential, but has so far experienced very little real-world use. If we’re going to solve any of these problems in a real and lasting way, we’re going to need innovation, and cooperation on a scale we’ve never seen before because none of the generations that are alive today have experienced a problem like this before.

This is the first in a series of posts. I’ll write several short pieces identifying the problem and then several short pieces proposing solutions. Please leave your comments and let me know what you think.