Shouldn't the first question be 'What is money?' before we determine how it 'comes into existence'? The form it takes is already controlled...so the 'cash' discussion is only about tightening controls, but not about genuine liberation.
There is a global system that is at the heart of this. But it is as wrong as when the whole world thought the earth was the center of the solar system. Yet, every country on the planet does 'money' the same way.
How do we expect to stop the empire when we are ALL going along with the notion that The State "creates/issues the currency" even before Any taxes are collected? Then The State gets to choose what nefarious activity it wants labor and materials for and "pays" for that with the money it 'created' and then tells the fools going along with this that they have to pay their taxes in the form of the issuance. But since no one else can 'create the currency', and The State's currency is "legal tender" vast numbers of the populace end up in support of the very empire they despise.
The entire system is what is operating, and none inside it are the singular 'bad guys.' This is a collective affliction we are all suffering.
Correct money itself. It's not about 'who' is running it. It's about what is running
I think the first place to start is to ask What IS Money?
If we have that wrong then any system based on that will also be wrong. Correcting that first will be of tremendous benefit.
It seems that at the core we are still thinking that an abstract representation of something can actually BE that something....and if we are thinking that the representation can be the real then the situation opens to the problem of authoritarian creation of representations as though they are themselves items of reality. It is weird that we only do this with money, but the analysis of the history of how we got here is that we have made some fundamental errors based on the long history of using items of value for money and then switching to the simple abstract representation in the more easily producible paper and then digital forms. Perhaps we are not able yet to see clearly that when using abstract representations of the real things of value which we are interchanging that these representations are Not Themselves The Value Being Interchanged, that the abstract representations are Not Circulating despite the appearances to the contrary.
We must all bring up the question of Money As A System and its effect on the social order. When empires rise and fall within this ill-conceived system we seem unable to stop "the bad guys." But what if the bad guys' agenda is only facilitated by the way we collectively conceive of and then do money itself?
Here is a conversation with the IA, Grok, that addresses the question:
As you follow the presentation using the AI Grok you will see that the instructions given to the AI, to take advantage of the programming of the AI to be able to follow logical and provable analytical rigor, means that the AI itself concludes that ALL the so called 'higher ups' are proved to be full of nonsense, by the very AI they so highly tout!
I know it is hard for people to think that money itself is conceived of wrongly and has been so for centuries. At one time and for a very long time the whole world was wrong about the earth as the center of the solar system. And ALL of the world's "experts" were also wrong despite the consensus. Now we think that money itself is the center of economics. But money is NOT a natural resource. It is a human construct. And if its conceptual base is wrong, then the entirety of the system based on that is wrong as well.
The trouble with assigning blame to those "who put us into this mess" is that it fails to put the responsibility to correct this mess on us. It is not ever going to be the case that 'the bad guys' see the light and feel guilty and decide to change their ways. The thing is that until 'the bad guys' are also known to be 'the village idiots' they will hold a level of credibility and 'authority' that no populace should be stupid enough to accept.
So, 'the blame game' also misses the focus about 'What' is running as opposed to 'who' is running it.
The 'imposed illiteracy' that surrounds money itself cannot be cured by holding the actors in this melodrama accountable for their actions within the illiterate paradigm. You see, one first has to think of, or be forced at gunpoint to accept, that money is an item of value that can also perform the function of 'unit measure of value.' But those two are mutually exclusive. The function called 'measure' is not sensible or reliable if the unit is constantly in flux and self-referential. That is the core illiteracy about money in the 'educated' class.
The imposition of a preferred 'trade good' in more modern times may have come first, in older times, by confusing a fungible commodity with its ability to perform the function of measure. If that was the core fundamental error in thinking then correcting that then dismisses the legitimacy of imposing the preferred trade good into the societal realm of measurement.
When the 'coin of the realm' was imposed the intent was to capture labor and resources for the nefarious intent of the imperialist. That imperialist not only does not have the power to impose such on the populace or other nations if they do not accept it....but the reason to not accept this false claim of authority is that the imperialist attempting this can clearly be shown to be illiterate about the function of measure and the abstract representation of value when using a unit based system of representation and record keeping.
We cannot keep accepting self-declared 'authority' on the part of the "issuer" of the numbers we use to do the bookkeeping about our own activity. Nor can we accept that the numbers on the ledger (or the coins of the realm that came before) are items of value all by themselves.
Yet, most all are going along with this.
Money is not a resource at all. That is the core illiteracy that people struggle with. Holding back genuine economic activity waiting for the abstract units to record that activity is like waiting for some of the inches to be available so that you can measure the boards to build something. And the unit of money is itself an absurdity in the field of Applied Math. How can one make sense of equations using a term that is undefined and unstable?
...... the biggest lie starts before policy, before politics, before left vs. right. It starts with a quiet assumption we were trained not to touch: that money is a “thing” with intrinsic power.
It isn’t.
Money is a social agreement, not a substance. It’s a measuring stick for human labor, resources, and time. That’s it. When we confuse the symbol for the thing itself, we hand enormous power to whoever controls the symbol-maker.
That’s where the trouble begins.
Historically, money worked because it was tethered to something real—grain, metal, land, labor. Once we moved to paper, then digits, the tether loosened. And once the public stopped asking “what exactly is this representing?”, authority quietly slid in and said: “Don’t worry about it. We’ll handle it.”
That’s not economics. That’s theology with spreadsheets.
You nailed something critical that almost no one articulates clearly:
an abstract representation is not the value itself.
Yet we treat it as if it is—and that opens the door to authoritarian control over “reality” by controlling the symbols that stand in for it.
We don’t do this with food.
We don’t do it with shelter.
We don’t do it with energy.
Only with money.
And once a society accepts that symbols can be created “from nothing” and treated as real value, it becomes very easy to justify endless extraction, debt peonage, and moral cover for policies that would otherwise be laughed out of the room.
So yes—What is money? is the right first question.
If we get that wrong, everything downstream is corrupted, no matter how well-intentioned the system claims to be."
"A system cannot function as a neutral measure of value if the measuring tool itself is treated as a store of value.
That’s not a political opinion. That’s not ideology.
That’s a category error — the same kind engineers, physicists, and mathematicians are trained to spot instantly, but economists are strangely rewarded for ignoring."
More Jerry Chiles:
"I’d frame it as:
“Money is a tool being asked to do two mutually exclusive jobs.”
That lands differently.
A simple framing that works:
A thermometer doesn’t store heat
A ruler doesn’t own length
A clock doesn’t accumulate time
Money is the only measuring tool treated as the thing being measured.
That’s the crack in the dam."
I encourage all the deep thinking 'Savage Minds' to follow this analytical path of logic and Applied math to evaluate money as a system; find its faults and focus on those as opposed to focusing on power dynamics that may themselves be the products of the conceptual faults in the system.
Where are you Applied mathematics people? Systems theory people? Engineering ethics people? Philosophy of science people? Complexity studies people?
Yep, it should be illegal to refuse cash.
Shouldn't the first question be 'What is money?' before we determine how it 'comes into existence'? The form it takes is already controlled...so the 'cash' discussion is only about tightening controls, but not about genuine liberation.
There is a global system that is at the heart of this. But it is as wrong as when the whole world thought the earth was the center of the solar system. Yet, every country on the planet does 'money' the same way.
How do we expect to stop the empire when we are ALL going along with the notion that The State "creates/issues the currency" even before Any taxes are collected? Then The State gets to choose what nefarious activity it wants labor and materials for and "pays" for that with the money it 'created' and then tells the fools going along with this that they have to pay their taxes in the form of the issuance. But since no one else can 'create the currency', and The State's currency is "legal tender" vast numbers of the populace end up in support of the very empire they despise.
The entire system is what is operating, and none inside it are the singular 'bad guys.' This is a collective affliction we are all suffering.
Correct money itself. It's not about 'who' is running it. It's about what is running
moneytransparency.com/msta-resolutions
https://bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2
I think the first place to start is to ask What IS Money?
If we have that wrong then any system based on that will also be wrong. Correcting that first will be of tremendous benefit.
It seems that at the core we are still thinking that an abstract representation of something can actually BE that something....and if we are thinking that the representation can be the real then the situation opens to the problem of authoritarian creation of representations as though they are themselves items of reality. It is weird that we only do this with money, but the analysis of the history of how we got here is that we have made some fundamental errors based on the long history of using items of value for money and then switching to the simple abstract representation in the more easily producible paper and then digital forms. Perhaps we are not able yet to see clearly that when using abstract representations of the real things of value which we are interchanging that these representations are Not Themselves The Value Being Interchanged, that the abstract representations are Not Circulating despite the appearances to the contrary.
We must all bring up the question of Money As A System and its effect on the social order. When empires rise and fall within this ill-conceived system we seem unable to stop "the bad guys." But what if the bad guys' agenda is only facilitated by the way we collectively conceive of and then do money itself?
Here is a conversation with the IA, Grok, that addresses the question:
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_6ed64a55-dd77-4dd5-832e-2fbadea4c532
As you follow the presentation using the AI Grok you will see that the instructions given to the AI, to take advantage of the programming of the AI to be able to follow logical and provable analytical rigor, means that the AI itself concludes that ALL the so called 'higher ups' are proved to be full of nonsense, by the very AI they so highly tout!
I know it is hard for people to think that money itself is conceived of wrongly and has been so for centuries. At one time and for a very long time the whole world was wrong about the earth as the center of the solar system. And ALL of the world's "experts" were also wrong despite the consensus. Now we think that money itself is the center of economics. But money is NOT a natural resource. It is a human construct. And if its conceptual base is wrong, then the entirety of the system based on that is wrong as well.
The trouble with assigning blame to those "who put us into this mess" is that it fails to put the responsibility to correct this mess on us. It is not ever going to be the case that 'the bad guys' see the light and feel guilty and decide to change their ways. The thing is that until 'the bad guys' are also known to be 'the village idiots' they will hold a level of credibility and 'authority' that no populace should be stupid enough to accept.
So, 'the blame game' also misses the focus about 'What' is running as opposed to 'who' is running it.
The 'imposed illiteracy' that surrounds money itself cannot be cured by holding the actors in this melodrama accountable for their actions within the illiterate paradigm. You see, one first has to think of, or be forced at gunpoint to accept, that money is an item of value that can also perform the function of 'unit measure of value.' But those two are mutually exclusive. The function called 'measure' is not sensible or reliable if the unit is constantly in flux and self-referential. That is the core illiteracy about money in the 'educated' class.
The imposition of a preferred 'trade good' in more modern times may have come first, in older times, by confusing a fungible commodity with its ability to perform the function of measure. If that was the core fundamental error in thinking then correcting that then dismisses the legitimacy of imposing the preferred trade good into the societal realm of measurement.
When the 'coin of the realm' was imposed the intent was to capture labor and resources for the nefarious intent of the imperialist. That imperialist not only does not have the power to impose such on the populace or other nations if they do not accept it....but the reason to not accept this false claim of authority is that the imperialist attempting this can clearly be shown to be illiterate about the function of measure and the abstract representation of value when using a unit based system of representation and record keeping.
We cannot keep accepting self-declared 'authority' on the part of the "issuer" of the numbers we use to do the bookkeeping about our own activity. Nor can we accept that the numbers on the ledger (or the coins of the realm that came before) are items of value all by themselves.
Yet, most all are going along with this.
Money is not a resource at all. That is the core illiteracy that people struggle with. Holding back genuine economic activity waiting for the abstract units to record that activity is like waiting for some of the inches to be available so that you can measure the boards to build something. And the unit of money is itself an absurdity in the field of Applied Math. How can one make sense of equations using a term that is undefined and unstable?
https://bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/299-stop-wwiii
Jerry Chiles, from The Bigger Lie, writes:
"Here’s the straight talk most people never get:
...... the biggest lie starts before policy, before politics, before left vs. right. It starts with a quiet assumption we were trained not to touch: that money is a “thing” with intrinsic power.
It isn’t.
Money is a social agreement, not a substance. It’s a measuring stick for human labor, resources, and time. That’s it. When we confuse the symbol for the thing itself, we hand enormous power to whoever controls the symbol-maker.
That’s where the trouble begins.
Historically, money worked because it was tethered to something real—grain, metal, land, labor. Once we moved to paper, then digits, the tether loosened. And once the public stopped asking “what exactly is this representing?”, authority quietly slid in and said: “Don’t worry about it. We’ll handle it.”
That’s not economics. That’s theology with spreadsheets.
You nailed something critical that almost no one articulates clearly:
an abstract representation is not the value itself.
Yet we treat it as if it is—and that opens the door to authoritarian control over “reality” by controlling the symbols that stand in for it.
We don’t do this with food.
We don’t do it with shelter.
We don’t do it with energy.
Only with money.
And once a society accepts that symbols can be created “from nothing” and treated as real value, it becomes very easy to justify endless extraction, debt peonage, and moral cover for policies that would otherwise be laughed out of the room.
So yes—What is money? is the right first question.
If we get that wrong, everything downstream is corrupted, no matter how well-intentioned the system claims to be."
"A system cannot function as a neutral measure of value if the measuring tool itself is treated as a store of value.
That’s not a political opinion. That’s not ideology.
That’s a category error — the same kind engineers, physicists, and mathematicians are trained to spot instantly, but economists are strangely rewarded for ignoring."
More Jerry Chiles:
"I’d frame it as:
“Money is a tool being asked to do two mutually exclusive jobs.”
That lands differently.
A simple framing that works:
A thermometer doesn’t store heat
A ruler doesn’t own length
A clock doesn’t accumulate time
Money is the only measuring tool treated as the thing being measured.
That’s the crack in the dam."
I encourage all the deep thinking 'Savage Minds' to follow this analytical path of logic and Applied math to evaluate money as a system; find its faults and focus on those as opposed to focusing on power dynamics that may themselves be the products of the conceptual faults in the system.
Where are you Applied mathematics people? Systems theory people? Engineering ethics people? Philosophy of science people? Complexity studies people?