Do you think the US monetized system is flawed?

[Tranquil Claw 80]

Have you ever wondered what would happen if the dollar never existed and a different system of exchange was adopted? Could you imagine the average dollar or credit being replaced by something else entirely? Do you think that the age old system used to this day is still the best possible system one could have come up with? 

 

To answer questions like these I like to return to the foundation our currency is built on, representation. More specifically, a representation of what you are in possession of. After a while money started branching off and taking on new meanings like promises to fund this to get back more of that. Banks sprung up and so did debt. Money had evolved from something useful to something potentially dangerous. Cautions had to be taken to warn others of this danger and fear finds yet another material thing to inhabit. Money turned from a use to a trade off over the course of time. Representation was the initial goal of money, what it represents though, is what matters.

 

Say money instead directly represented the accomplishments of an individual. How would it change and for good or bad?

 

Say money instead directly represented the respect an individual received. How would it change and for good or bad?

 

These are just some examples that I can think of off the top of my head. What do you think?

[alpinefroggy 451]

Money doesn't represent anything but the most fluid form of material wealth. And it is very important for smooth and quick commerce as it allows for the convient exchange of goods by giving everyone something that can universally used for everything. It's a great idea but it really is not some horrible thing that fear lives in. Humans have engendered that meaning into money through our nature. What it represents has never changed. What it seems to humans has maybe changed.

Edited November 28, 2015 by alpinefroggy

[Tranquil Claw 80]

I suppose it's just a factor of lost meaning over time. Something I notice very often, is that things get taken for granted as they age, thus making them seem as if they need something new to make them worth keeping around. That explains why human nature is so good at innovation. Anyways, what it represents is the exact same thing as what it means to humans. When what it means to us changes, what it represents changes.

 

I can agree that my use of "fear" is a bit extreme, but when I said that, I was referring to the occasion where one loses something or is taught to think of using something as dangerous to themselves. I think you kind of dodged my original question by redefining money's purpose. What I was asking for was, are the added innovations to money like banks and credit a benefit or a deficit to it's original use. 

[EpicEnergy 23,220]

I believe that everything has flaws, so my answer is yes.

Also, money is starting to become a concept, with more and more things going digital.

[Ixrec 86]

Most of the points in the OP aren't unique to the US and have been around for an extremely long time. Fractional reserve banking for example goes back millenia. For the most part, money existing and having the uses it does (i.e. medium of exchange, store of value, etc) just makes it a tool that can be used for good or ill, not something intrinsically "dangerous". Most of the money-related problems we have these days are really about what we (or our governments) choose to spend money on, e.g. why has inequality gotten so bad that the richest 1% own >40% of the world's wealth, which doesn't have much to do with the concept of money itself (it'd still be bad if it was >40% of anything else). The fact that you can get yourself in trouble by spending money you don't have is fundamentally no different to the fact that you can get yourself in trouble by promising three barrels of cider you can't deliver.

"the accomplishments of an individual" and "the respect an individual received" are unquantifiable, so we'll never be able to represent them with anything you could reasonably call "money". You can try, and people often do, but it inevitably leads to gaming of flawed metrics until the metric becomes totally unrelated to what it was supposed to measure. Just think about how much our behavior would change if these forums started handing out a dollar for every brohoof.

Of course, there's plenty of real issues with US macroeconomic policy, but they're all far more complicated than "should money exist", and most of them are about a lot more than just money (e.g. how low should interest rates be kept for how long to help deal with the coronavirus?).

Edited July 3, 2020 by Ixrec

[Dreambiscuit 9,901]

Something has to be used for general exchange for goods and services, and whatever the currently accepted form happens to be is fine with me. As long as nothing pointless or radical is done to change a system that works fine already, I'm fine with it.