Money
With a known history going back over 11,000 years, Money is integral in everyday life. Money is a storage of energy. It allows one to bottle their time (through employment) and trade their only given resource for other stored energy sources, food, shelter, clothing, leisure, pleasure, in various forms including paper, physical, and digital. Today, we operate in a manipulated world as we transact without real Money. The world has been duped.
Money requires five key principles:
Divisibility
Portability
Durability
Fungibility
Intrinsic Value (Includes Scarcity)
Without these key principles, the title of Money is not fulfilled: everything else is currency - a means of exchange.
Divisibility - Were one to buy a candy bar with a $100 bill, you’d expect change. RIP the US Penny - 1793-2025.
Portability - It’s extremely difficult to take your cow to the store to buy groceries, harder to divide. In our new digital age, portability is taking on a new meaning as stores become cashless and banking is required online.
Durability - Money needs to last. One can’t trade last year’s peach crop for a haircut as it will have rotted..
Fungibility - Money requires consistency across units. A peach from Katherine Barlow is worth a lot more to Sam and the town of Green Lake than one of my measly peaches. So, a price can’t be established in peaches.
Intrinsic Value - Money needs to have intrinsic value, pillared by scarcity. If everyone had a printing press or gold mine in their basement, then those would have no value. It must be universally demanded, as not everyone may want to trade their own resources for pork.
In modern society, everyone refers to (Dollar, Euro, RMB, Yen, Ruble) as Money; they are currency. There is an unlimited supply with no inherent value.
This ruse has given Central Banks the ability to debase currency by printing unlimited dollars, destroying the savor to benefit debtors. Throughout time, this creates the massive inequality we see today, as the value of time is diminished relative to scarce goods.
It is important to note that as time progresses, fiat expands, requiring additional dollars to be borrowed into existence. The price of everything in existence will continually increase. The question is, is their respective growth outpacing naturally, real terms (time), or is it lagging debasement and simply rising nominally.
The chart below correlates the divergence between productivity and real wages to the implementation of fiat currency in 1971. Although wages rise nominally (Green Line), we see and know from experience that real wages are exponentially lagging, explaining the inequality and decimation of the middle class today.
Chart courtesy of WTF Happened in 1971: WTF Happened In 1971?