It makes people crazy. It’s hoarded, stolen, worshiped, collected, exchanged, borrowed/lent, counterfeited, begged for, spent-like-a-sailor and “the root of all evil”. It’s real value is, well “less than the paper it’s printed on” but, although there’s no published empirical proof, it’s universally accepted that it “makes the world go ‘round”. There are, by somebody’s count, 180 national currencies with inflation/deflation fluctuations based on formulae indecipherable, even to those charged with ciphering them. The exchange rates, one to the other, are based on everything and nothing simultaneously, which makes Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David both giggly and rich. With deference to Paul Krugman, (and any other studied economists), the topic is such a load of horseshit that the lauded experts in the field, not unlike weathermen, (in whatever unpredictable fields they are standing), rarely get anything right.
As someone who has had both more than I need and less than enough at ungraphable cyclic intervals, as well as being a semi-interested observer of the graphable angst caused by the amorphous ooze that is the global economy, I have, from time to time, tried to grasp just how we were led down such a wayward path. How money/wealth became as weighty a force as say, gravity, is an enigma with no philosophical footing. Someone, I’ll call him Glurf, (because this is my blog after all), told his neighbor, Wally, (same reasoning), that the handful of yak dung he was holding was really, really valuable and that, today only, he was willing to give him half for his saber-toothed tiger, his oldest daughter, Marilyn, (oh, shut up!), and some soup. From that day forward everything has turned to…well, yak dung. The voraciously insidious pursuit of one or all of the 180 world currencies, the success of which gives perceived credible voice to otherwise insignificant morons like Donald Trump or Sheik whoever or some tenth generation royal nincompoop, has skewed man’s basic moral compass completely off course, (see, “root of all evil”, above).
Can anyone explain to me, (Paul, feel free to chime in), why everything from addressing climate change to dealing with health crises, ending hunger to making our power grid, roads and bridges safe and secure, from embracing peace to ending war is a relentlessly unwinnable debate about the cost of those things, when the currency needed to satisfy those costs is quite literally equivalent to a handful of…?