How does one expect to stop asshole nations from their shit while remaining loyal to the notion that the state creates the currency?? Most all are going along with this.
In ancient times the temple priests told the peasantry who came to make their offerings to God that the offerings brought by the peasants were not acceptable to God. The priests told the people they needed to take the coins, that only the priests issued, and leave the Real Goods that the peasants had brought to the temple with the priests, go lay the coins on the altar because that was acceptable to God, and then go home.
The original claims of 'authority' about ‘money’ by the temple priests is where the eventual claim of authority about money by government originated.
But the claim of 'authority' is nonsense, and so is the system of money itself; since what is real is the wealth of a people, and money is made up nonsense that the people have been told is real (acceptable to god). It's a long history of lies and deception. It is like unto the miss use of genuine authority as egregious as telling kids lies!
We are not going to get out of this mess while using the very system instituted ages ago to enslave and deceive and steal.
Money creation, from nothing and yet turned into a thing of 'value' - Poof! - is NOT a power that anyone actually has, not anyone, not any government, not any bank. It is interesting that the whole digital coin world touts the 'traceability' aspect of the transactions but stops at the original instance of the magical "creation" of the coins as though that process is legitimate!
The first premise most people willingly go along with is the absolute illiteracy and illegitimacy of there being these so called "financial powers." WE ALL are the ones accepting the nonsense that the origination of the monetary unit is a magical process of 'creation' by some magical monetary power within government or banking. And we accept this stupid shit because we think that the monetary unit is an actual item of 'value'.
Elizabeth Black:
“Those who brag about their education, certification, degrees and what they consider qualifications are usually unable to unlearn the misinformation of the level of indoctrination they worked hard for, and paid, and their justification of their pride stands in the way of recognizing their own errors.”
Bruce Fanger:
“Markus, you are pointing at the load bearing beam most critiques politely step around.
Money is treated as if it were both a ruler and a thing measured, which is a category error so old it has hardened into theology. Once the unit of account is rebranded as an object of value, authority slides in quietly and never leaves. First the temple, then the crown, then the state, then the bank. Same move, different costumes.
That is why moral critiques of capitalism stall. People argue about greed inside a system whose imperatives reward extraction by design. You cannot ethically behave your way out of a structure that converts abstraction into power and power into violence. As you note, much of what we call “the economy” is bookkeeping in service of coercion, especially war. David Graeber was right to trace coinage, debt, and militarism as a single historical thread rather than separate domains.
Where I would sharpen your point is this. The problem is not just misunderstanding money. It is obedience to a measurement system that is allowed to rewrite reality. People delay building, feeding, healing, or creating until permission slips in the form of numbers appear. That is how a fiction begins to rule material life.
You are also right that blaming villains misses the deeper failure. The system does not persist because bad actors are clever. It persists because the conceptual error is rarely challenged at the root. Until money is understood as record keeping and coordination rather than wealth itself, the same cycles will repeat with different flags and uniforms.”
The paradigm shift that must occur is to first abandon the ages old mistaken reasoning about money and how it is defined and then structured. The present paradigm is simply wrong and cannot be made to or regulated to work.
The following link has several layers (and links in each layer) to be able to take your time to get to a level of comprehension that will allow you to have an accurate and articulate understanding of the paradigm and to be able to give it an accurate and articulate representation that is Not A Personal Interpretation.
Yes money’s authority is of course instituted rather than natural. But that doesn't mean "false." The leap from "money is a convention" to "money is pure deception" is the step I can't follow. No social reality exists without a degree of fictionalisation. Think of language, law, the state, the person. None of it natural. So the key question is not whether money is real or false but what kind of reality it conjures, and what it compels once it's instituted. That's why the critique has to run through political economy.
Fabio, you present a circular argument by first suggesting that money somehow magically holds some kind of inherent authority. Your words "money's authority". That is nonsense on its own and definitely does not confer or mandate from there some kind of political authority.
Your words get more and more convoluted and contradictory when you say 'social "realities" exist inside some kind of fictionalization.' And then you go on to say that money somehow magically possesses a power to 'conjure a reality' after it has been instituted by some seemingly also magical political entity that has some magical powers to compel a specifically fictionalized reality that obtains this magical power through some, also fictitious, political process. The reason I assert that that political process is fictitious is because history only documents the imperial imposition of money as it is done today. So, what is compelled is NOT compelled by money itself but by those imposing it on the populace. Have you not done any homework in monetary history?
Excluding language (which is not actually initiated by the same process) from your other references as to imposed fictions by the imperial process, you seem to be attempting to make accommodation for and justification for imperial imposition on the basis of other long standing impositions. That is not legitimate reasoning or justification and wreaks of circularity.
Also, please stop presenting straw man responses. No where in anything I or the MSTA have presented do we say "money is pure deception". So if you cannot at least address something directly within what I have presented, please stop the inaccurate personal interpretation that misrepresents what I and the MSTA are saying.
It appears to me that you have not actually opened and simply perused, much less studied, the content of this link:
It is disheartening to think that so called 'scholarly' discussion can be attempted when one will not and does not at least become familiar with what one would like to challenge before doing so.
On another Substack page Michael Fox writes about Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI: "Paragraph 2294 teaches that claiming moral neutrality in scientific research is an illusion. Leo writes similarly that technology takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it, and explicitly rejects the claim that AI is morally neutral."
I agree. I would like to suggest that in this analysis there is a missed compounding and at least a very powerful means to subjugate this whole mess by way of a correction of even the pope's blind acceptance of this notion of "finance." That notion is itself already corrupted by the biases [illiteracies] of those implementing that system, which is the means by which the whole AI process is being 'developed.' But that system is already independently running away with itself and seemingly unable to be stopped. That system Is Not Morally Neutral, and it is inherently unstable. That instability creates and then presents situations which seem to be problems for persons and nations to resolve and become the very insecurity that an AI or a human will unscientifically and ineffectively attempt to resolve From Within the very system causing the problem.
May I offer once again Marc's book: THE LONGEST STANDING ERROR IN HISTORY: A PUBLIC POLICY BLUEPRINT DISTINGUISHING REAL FROM PHANTOM VALUE by Marc Gauvin McNeill (Author) Format: Paperback https://a.co/d/0bgdhXQP (Amazon English paperback link)
The back-cover says: "You live inside a phantom system that alters your behaviour in order to feed it. No one governs it; everyone is governed by it. People vie to position themselves within it to escape the instability it produces, without ever identifying the root, a singular common misrepresentation assumed as an immutable ‘fact of life’. Like a software bug, it creates phantom imperatives and rewards, diverting our vital energies towards what we otherwise deplore. Correct the misrepresentation and the phantom effects cease — not gradually, but definitionally, like a switch. What is not instantaneous is seeing the system for what it really is, a set of false imperatives presented as necessary to protect ourselves and our families. This document presents the formal case for that correction. Working from First Independent Logical Principles, it shows that our current operative notion of money conflates two ontologically distinct and mutually exclusive concepts — measure and commodity — this is the bug. The result is confirmed across eight formal independent frameworks, from measure theory to BIBO stability, each identifying the identical anomaly: real and phantom wealth are conflated, undermining our ability to assess reality and consequently our ability to decide. The measurable cost: for our current standard of living we need about eleven hours a week, against a current average of thirty-three. Read as a method rather than as a remedy, learn how to apply the eight formal techniques to your world: what makes a monetary unit valid, how to tell an anchored definition from a circular one, and how to trace any claim to something independently observable. Those tools apply far beyond money. This will give you all you need to make your own decision; no matter your background, all it takes is the will to check."
Mark, I'm not going to keep restating a position you've already decided is circular, and I'm not going to accept that reading Gauvin is a precondition for disagreeing with your argument. For the record: describing how money's instituted authority operates is not the same as endorsing it; that's the same distinction as describing how the state's monopoly on violence works. If that distinction doesn't land for you, we're not going to get anywhere, and I'm happy to leave it there. I'm going to stop replying on this thread.
Thank you for this analysis.
How does one expect to stop asshole nations from their shit while remaining loyal to the notion that the state creates the currency?? Most all are going along with this.
In ancient times the temple priests told the peasantry who came to make their offerings to God that the offerings brought by the peasants were not acceptable to God. The priests told the people they needed to take the coins, that only the priests issued, and leave the Real Goods that the peasants had brought to the temple with the priests, go lay the coins on the altar because that was acceptable to God, and then go home.
The original claims of 'authority' about ‘money’ by the temple priests is where the eventual claim of authority about money by government originated.
But the claim of 'authority' is nonsense, and so is the system of money itself; since what is real is the wealth of a people, and money is made up nonsense that the people have been told is real (acceptable to god). It's a long history of lies and deception. It is like unto the miss use of genuine authority as egregious as telling kids lies!
We are not going to get out of this mess while using the very system instituted ages ago to enslave and deceive and steal.
Money creation, from nothing and yet turned into a thing of 'value' - Poof! - is NOT a power that anyone actually has, not anyone, not any government, not any bank. It is interesting that the whole digital coin world touts the 'traceability' aspect of the transactions but stops at the original instance of the magical "creation" of the coins as though that process is legitimate!
The first premise most people willingly go along with is the absolute illiteracy and illegitimacy of there being these so called "financial powers." WE ALL are the ones accepting the nonsense that the origination of the monetary unit is a magical process of 'creation' by some magical monetary power within government or banking. And we accept this stupid shit because we think that the monetary unit is an actual item of 'value'.
Elizabeth Black:
“Those who brag about their education, certification, degrees and what they consider qualifications are usually unable to unlearn the misinformation of the level of indoctrination they worked hard for, and paid, and their justification of their pride stands in the way of recognizing their own errors.”
Bruce Fanger:
“Markus, you are pointing at the load bearing beam most critiques politely step around.
Money is treated as if it were both a ruler and a thing measured, which is a category error so old it has hardened into theology. Once the unit of account is rebranded as an object of value, authority slides in quietly and never leaves. First the temple, then the crown, then the state, then the bank. Same move, different costumes.
That is why moral critiques of capitalism stall. People argue about greed inside a system whose imperatives reward extraction by design. You cannot ethically behave your way out of a structure that converts abstraction into power and power into violence. As you note, much of what we call “the economy” is bookkeeping in service of coercion, especially war. David Graeber was right to trace coinage, debt, and militarism as a single historical thread rather than separate domains.
Where I would sharpen your point is this. The problem is not just misunderstanding money. It is obedience to a measurement system that is allowed to rewrite reality. People delay building, feeding, healing, or creating until permission slips in the form of numbers appear. That is how a fiction begins to rule material life.
You are also right that blaming villains misses the deeper failure. The system does not persist because bad actors are clever. It persists because the conceptual error is rarely challenged at the root. Until money is understood as record keeping and coordination rather than wealth itself, the same cycles will repeat with different flags and uniforms.”
The paradigm shift that must occur is to first abandon the ages old mistaken reasoning about money and how it is defined and then structured. The present paradigm is simply wrong and cannot be made to or regulated to work.
The following link has several layers (and links in each layer) to be able to take your time to get to a level of comprehension that will allow you to have an accurate and articulate understanding of the paradigm and to be able to give it an accurate and articulate representation that is Not A Personal Interpretation.
https://www.moneytransparency.com/get-the-materials
And here is the link to buy Marc's book:
THE LONGEST STANDING ERROR IN HISTORY:
A PUBLIC POLICY BLUEPRINT DISTINGUISHING
REAL FROM PHANTOM VALUE
by Marc Gauvin McNeill (Author) Format: Paperback
https://a.co/d/0bgdhXQP (Amazon English paperback link)
Yes money’s authority is of course instituted rather than natural. But that doesn't mean "false." The leap from "money is a convention" to "money is pure deception" is the step I can't follow. No social reality exists without a degree of fictionalisation. Think of language, law, the state, the person. None of it natural. So the key question is not whether money is real or false but what kind of reality it conjures, and what it compels once it's instituted. That's why the critique has to run through political economy.
Fabio, you present a circular argument by first suggesting that money somehow magically holds some kind of inherent authority. Your words "money's authority". That is nonsense on its own and definitely does not confer or mandate from there some kind of political authority.
Your words get more and more convoluted and contradictory when you say 'social "realities" exist inside some kind of fictionalization.' And then you go on to say that money somehow magically possesses a power to 'conjure a reality' after it has been instituted by some seemingly also magical political entity that has some magical powers to compel a specifically fictionalized reality that obtains this magical power through some, also fictitious, political process. The reason I assert that that political process is fictitious is because history only documents the imperial imposition of money as it is done today. So, what is compelled is NOT compelled by money itself but by those imposing it on the populace. Have you not done any homework in monetary history?
Excluding language (which is not actually initiated by the same process) from your other references as to imposed fictions by the imperial process, you seem to be attempting to make accommodation for and justification for imperial imposition on the basis of other long standing impositions. That is not legitimate reasoning or justification and wreaks of circularity.
Also, please stop presenting straw man responses. No where in anything I or the MSTA have presented do we say "money is pure deception". So if you cannot at least address something directly within what I have presented, please stop the inaccurate personal interpretation that misrepresents what I and the MSTA are saying.
It appears to me that you have not actually opened and simply perused, much less studied, the content of this link:
https://www.moneytransparency.com/get-the-materials Do you know what the MSTA is actually saying??
It is disheartening to think that so called 'scholarly' discussion can be attempted when one will not and does not at least become familiar with what one would like to challenge before doing so.
On another Substack page Michael Fox writes about Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI: "Paragraph 2294 teaches that claiming moral neutrality in scientific research is an illusion. Leo writes similarly that technology takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it, and explicitly rejects the claim that AI is morally neutral."
I agree. I would like to suggest that in this analysis there is a missed compounding and at least a very powerful means to subjugate this whole mess by way of a correction of even the pope's blind acceptance of this notion of "finance." That notion is itself already corrupted by the biases [illiteracies] of those implementing that system, which is the means by which the whole AI process is being 'developed.' But that system is already independently running away with itself and seemingly unable to be stopped. That system Is Not Morally Neutral, and it is inherently unstable. That instability creates and then presents situations which seem to be problems for persons and nations to resolve and become the very insecurity that an AI or a human will unscientifically and ineffectively attempt to resolve From Within the very system causing the problem.
May I offer once again Marc's book: THE LONGEST STANDING ERROR IN HISTORY: A PUBLIC POLICY BLUEPRINT DISTINGUISHING REAL FROM PHANTOM VALUE by Marc Gauvin McNeill (Author) Format: Paperback https://a.co/d/0bgdhXQP (Amazon English paperback link)
The back-cover says: "You live inside a phantom system that alters your behaviour in order to feed it. No one governs it; everyone is governed by it. People vie to position themselves within it to escape the instability it produces, without ever identifying the root, a singular common misrepresentation assumed as an immutable ‘fact of life’. Like a software bug, it creates phantom imperatives and rewards, diverting our vital energies towards what we otherwise deplore. Correct the misrepresentation and the phantom effects cease — not gradually, but definitionally, like a switch. What is not instantaneous is seeing the system for what it really is, a set of false imperatives presented as necessary to protect ourselves and our families. This document presents the formal case for that correction. Working from First Independent Logical Principles, it shows that our current operative notion of money conflates two ontologically distinct and mutually exclusive concepts — measure and commodity — this is the bug. The result is confirmed across eight formal independent frameworks, from measure theory to BIBO stability, each identifying the identical anomaly: real and phantom wealth are conflated, undermining our ability to assess reality and consequently our ability to decide. The measurable cost: for our current standard of living we need about eleven hours a week, against a current average of thirty-three. Read as a method rather than as a remedy, learn how to apply the eight formal techniques to your world: what makes a monetary unit valid, how to tell an anchored definition from a circular one, and how to trace any claim to something independently observable. Those tools apply far beyond money. This will give you all you need to make your own decision; no matter your background, all it takes is the will to check."
Mark, I'm not going to keep restating a position you've already decided is circular, and I'm not going to accept that reading Gauvin is a precondition for disagreeing with your argument. For the record: describing how money's instituted authority operates is not the same as endorsing it; that's the same distinction as describing how the state's monopoly on violence works. If that distinction doesn't land for you, we're not going to get anywhere, and I'm happy to leave it there. I'm going to stop replying on this thread.