The Abuse of Money

[Rory Short]

Because conventional money is a commonly accepted store of value between voluntary exchanges of real goods and/or services it can, if it is treated as a commodity in its own right, be traded and then it becomes vary difficult indeed to keep a link between the value represented by the money and the value of the goods and/or services it is supposed to represent. In my view it is this commodification of money that has enabled the the creation of the world's financial markets. The players in these markets are playing with wealth which they have had no hand in creating, all that they are trying to do by playing in the markets is to gather unto themselves in the form of money the real wealth created by others.

The above is the abuse of a brilliant invention namely money as a commonly accepted facilitator of exchanges of real goods and/or services. The problem is that we have allowed money to become a commodity in its oown right. How can we drop that delusion?

[Christoph Hensch]

Not sure it is that easy: just drop the delusion. It is a fact that conventional money is a commodity, not just a delusion.

However, what needs to be dropped is the current financial system. The only way to stop it from expanding even more is to a) set aside areas that are not tradable (stuff, rights, etc. that can simply not bought and sold on a market, maybe because they are declared 'the commons' - common ownership of all,etc.)
b) stop using the conventional money system in favour of either a gift economy or the use complementary currencies, like CES.

[Rory Short]

Christoph I agree that we need to drop the current financial system. We need to do this because it deals, trades, in unreality. And I agree that this will probably not be easy to do so we need to 'slowly slowly catchee monkey'. Perhaps people will be more prepared to do the things that you suggest and I see them as steps on the road to the ultimate chucking out of the present commodification and abuse of money.