At risk of sounding “snarky”, I get very frustrated in a lot of these sort of discussions. Any topic on the SDMB revolving around business or economics seems to be based on the presumtion that the entire business community is run by corrupt idiots and exists for no other purpose than to rob and loot from the masses.
**In attempting to understand The Money Power (TMP), which has dominated humanity for some 4000 years, **
Al you need to understand about money is that it is simply a means to communicate relative value. It has no inherent value in and of itself, other than it is not easily replicated outside of the Mint or the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
engendering violence and corruption regardless of what the reigning ideology is (feudalism, capitalism or socialism),
Money does not “engender violence”. Greed, jealousy, resentment, a sense of entitlement, and disparity of wealth engenders violence. Mankind has attempted to resolve these issues in many by creating different types of economic and government systems in order to try to maximimize wealth and production while equitably distributing resources in a fair way. The problem is that people have different access to resources and different skills and abilities. How do you distribute the fruits of their labor without creating disincentives or income disparity?
Feudalism - Tends to benefit a small number of landowners at the expense of a peasent class who are dependent on working the land for their livelihood
Capitalism - Provides more private ownership and allows people to pursue their wants and needs to the best of their ability, but does not ensure that all needs are met. And for some, can become almost feudalistic as people are forced to find a corporation to be their lord and master.
Socialism - Ideally provides equally for all, but creates disincentives to do more than the bare minimum as exceptional performance isn’t rewarded.
** I’ve come to the conclusion that it did not arise by itself but rather out of what I call the Trading Impulse (TI), which caused bartering to be superseded in obedience to the conceit of ‘coming out ahead’ in any transaction.**
I don’t understand what you mean here. Bartering is not substantially different from using currency, other than cash and credit cards are easier to carry than pigs, chickens and beads.
This implies that cheating is the basis of trade, the exchange of commodities to exploit differences in market value, as opposed to use value, which is the basis of barter. By ‘buying cheap and selling dear’ one hopes to find a greater fool who will pay more for a good than you did. And what better means to measure this outcome than with money?
The basis of trade is that each individual has access to different resources, skills and abilities and values them differently. If I raise chickens for a living, they are not as valuable to me, other than in the sense that I can trade my unused chickens for other goods and services (or money). Sure corruption and fraud exist, but much greater information exists which allows people to be more sophisticated when negotiating prices.
The invention of money first provided a medium of exchange between counterparties operating in good faith in a barter system. Money was also a means of storing a good’s use value, which also can fluctuate, but within tighter bounds than market value. But rather quickly, I imagine, it became a commodity in itself, with all the nasty consequences we’ve been seeing.
By “consequences”, I presume you are talking about the current financial crisis. The problem IMHO isn’t that money became a comodity, but that debt became a commodity. There is a school of thought that all money is derived from debt. In a certain sense it is. It is an agreement to provide value. A dollar bill is not fundamentally different from an equivalent gold coin or an entry in your bank account. They just have different amounts of risk associated with them. Where we got into trouble was in creating complex instruments for trading in debt without adequately assessing the risk (defined as the actual likelihood of getting paid back).
**This is already getting to be too long-winded for a first posting. But let me state my bottom line: how can we learn to say ‘no’ to TMP? **
Unless you could somehow live in a completely self-contained manner, you can’t. Another alternative is to work to make markets more efficient so that it becomes much harder to cheat. Of course business constantly look for ways to avoid their products from becoming comodities through specialization.