Money is merely a means to decouple the promise of payback from the promiser.
Without money, you have to trust Joe to help you can tomatoes next fall since you helped him plow his field. With money, Joe can pay you to plow his field, and you can pay Sally to help you can tomatoes (because Joe moved to another town).
Sure, but the emergent effects of money on society--especially with computerized banking--are quite a bit more significant than the fundamental innovation. Computers are merely for shuffling 1s and 0s around.
Well yeah. My comment was originally much longer, pointing out some of the things that money enabled.
But I was responding to his view that 'money is an illusion'. I was trying to point out that it's not an 'illusion' (whatever that means), and we didn't just make it up for fun or so some people could be rich and others poor. It serves a fundamentally valuable purpose.
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Money is merely a means to decouple the promise of payback from the promiser.
Without money, you have to trust Joe to help you can tomatoes next fall since you helped him plow his field. With money, Joe can pay you to plow his field, and you can pay Sally to help you can tomatoes (because Joe moved to another town).
Sure, but the emergent effects of money on society--especially with computerized banking--are quite a bit more significant than the fundamental innovation. Computers are merely for shuffling 1s and 0s around.
Well yeah. My comment was originally much longer, pointing out some of the things that money enabled.
But I was responding to his view that 'money is an illusion'. I was trying to point out that it's not an 'illusion' (whatever that means), and we didn't just make it up for fun or so some people could be rich and others poor. It serves a fundamentally valuable purpose.
>Computers are merely for shuffling 1s and 0s around.
If you're going to say that about computers, you might as well say it about people. As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, but same story.
but with money, in each instance, the recipient has to pay 1/3 or so to the government.