Money is not the objective

YOU decide the objective!

Earning money is political requirement of living in a social world

Earning money is a legal prerequisite to access resources in a specific political context. For some reason, there is a persistent lie that earning money is a universal objective itself. There are only two real reasons why earning money would be your primary objective:

1. Your want to serve the public to excess, no matter the cost to yourself or sacrifice required.
2. Your want to use government as a tool to colonize, dominate, and subjugate sovereign populations to serve your every whim and fancy.

It is surprising that the same goal, earning money, can be inspired by polar opposite motivations, but that is the reality. We either pursue money as an affirmation of public service, or because we want the public to be in our debt. In moderation, these two motivations are compatible and complement one another. For example, a police officer might have an altruistic interest in serving his community, but be unwilling to undertake that service without compensation. He requires that the public pay him a debt — giving him a salary and a pension, otherwise he will not fulfill his duties. This is a completely reasonable request, so we approve of his requested public debts, and the policeman is paid. That is all that is involved in paying public servants or any form of public spending, the debt must merely be approved, and debt holders can use those public debt grants for tax relief when April rolls around each year. Each of us in turn is required to serve and earn money to honor these debts to ourselves. In this way we collectively hold off the ultimate tax collector: death, by maintaining a functioning society that doesn’t destroy itself. Valar Dohaeris, Valar Morghulis.

It is important to note that without commitments from the public, the policeman cannot have any savings other than stocks of physical resources. These public commitments can take many forms, such as the commitment to enforce legal debts, property rights, recognize equity shares, or other legally backed financial claims.

Public debt and affirmation of public service go hand in hand. They are the two reasons we earn money. Public debt issuance is the process that holds society together in a practical physical sense, it is how we enforce and reward participation in building and maintaining a healthy society, preventing a Lord of the Flies scenario.

There are two types of debts issued by the public. One of them is your debt to the public, and the other is the public's debt to you. You owe the public taxes, and the state pays you money for tax relief.

When money loses its value

When you take earning money to the extreme, instead of complementing each other, the two motivations for earning money diverge. You either earn money to serve beyond what is needed, and can no longer expect reciprocity, or you “earn” money to inappropriately subjugate other people. At a certain level, the physical commitments represented by numerical debts no longer make any sense in terms of essential priorities. When personal monetary wealth exceeds a certain threshold, you can no longer spend it on personal consumption. You have more money than you can eat in food, wear as clothing, or build into housing.

People who pursue money to such an extreme, may be respectable and accomplished in many ways, but their goal of excessive personal wealth can be a childish and counterproductive game. Also problematic are those who encourage or excuse these inappropriate priorities, whether they are bankers, economists, politicians, or policy makers.

I have nothing against the hyper-wealthy, the problem is not their wealth, but when it comes at the cost of inappropriate priorities. There are many people who pursue personal wealth for personal reasons long after their needs are met. Confusing your priorities is not without real world costs, and this becomes increasingly probable as your wealth increases.

The wealthy find themselves in a uniquely challenging situation. If they want to continue to build wealth, they must learn to recognize and participate in social priorities even though they no longer have a personal need to do so. If they continue this pursuit for the wrong reasons, it will hurt themselves and others in the long run.

Looking at the lives of the very wealthy we can see this challenge play out with mixed results. Gates, Zuckerburg, Trump, and Musk all face this challenge, to name a few.

Universal value is leprechaun gold

Typically, a different reason is presented why people want to earn money. Money is pretended to be universal unit of value instead of merely a unit of account in a social context(such as a state unit of account). Because money represents pure value, the story goes, all of us want as much money as possible as our singular objective.

The unit of universal value is as much a fantasy as leprechaun gold.

This problem arises because we think of prices as a rational manifestation of physical resource costs. But this idea is exactly backwards. Prices are not the physical costs of resource use, they are the virtual or social costs. For this reason, prices are physically indeterminate, but are socially determined.

Prices are an expression of political social relationships. In this sense, prices are a choice. They are how we choose how we will express our political and social relationships. The fantasy that supply and demand resolves prices is backwards. This price model assumes specific political relationships with regards to resources, whereas prices are resolved by resolving political resource relationships.

To understand how prices work, we must not talk about markets, and supply and demand, but the culture of prices. This is how we distribute our burdens and rewards as a society.

Prices are a political and social choice, they are an expression of the political constraints of resource use and our shared social objectives.

This may sound like I am promoting a collectivist approach, but these conceptual facts are agnostic to your preferences regarding collectivism and individualism. I think individualism and other distributed political structures help make a more resilient, robust, and healthy society, so that’s why I like policy that distributes decision making to where it is most appropriate, even while collective institutions offer universal support and help create standards.

Costs are the physical constraints and limitations we face, prices are the virtual and social constraints and limitations.

Double Entry Bookkeeping Is a Bad Tool for Social Accounting

The primary feature of double entry accounting is conservation of quantities across all balance sheets. When a quantity of some unit is added to one balance sheet it is subtracted from another. This restriction is entirely inappropriate for performing effective virtual accounting programs needed to manage social resource use.

I will go into detail explaining how this flawed accounting model ruins intellectual property and civil litigation, as two examples.

Check back later or subscribe to this publication to read that post.