This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why shouldn’t the factory of money just make money and deposit a fixed amount into everyone’s account around the world to stop poverty and see what’s going to happen on this Earth?”
There is no “factory of money.”
There is a means of adding value to a raw state measured by money.
Even though we have money printing systems, money doesn’t magically appear from nowhere.
Money isn’t a magical piece of paper without any connection to the reality in which it operates.
Money is a token representing effort.
At its most basic level, money is a metric that determines labour volume, quality, and output.
Each person’s labour adds value to society and is supposed to be reflected in the amount of money each person has.
Money as a concept works exceptionally well as a store of value and a medium of value exchange.
What is screwed up in our economies is that we determine the value of each person’s contributions on largely subjective bases.
For example, there is no way that any executive on the planet works one thousand times harder than their front-line staff. It can be argued that the value of an executive’s labour is higher than that of the janitor, but it is also not one thousand times more valuable per hour.
That’s where the disconnect occurs in society and why poverty is not being solved as a problem even though we produce more than we can consume.
The problem we have been suffering from is due to a deliberate strategy for upward wealth redistribution. We have been lied to when told that the billionaires among us are the job creators. We have been lied to when our economies are structured around a “trickle-down” (and parasitic) economy that shuts down economic growth in favour of growing hoards by the few.
The problem, if the economy were a human circulatory system, is that we have allowed massive deposits of plaque to gum up the works, and it’s now threatening the entire body with systemic shutdown.
We need to clear up the plaque buildup and restore our circulatory system to full functionality — and that’s referred to as “speed of money” in economic terms.
The best way to accomplish that is to provide for the basic needs of all members of a society so that each is empowered to negotiate fair treatment in an environment characterized by abusive mistreatment by employers.
We can’t end poverty by printing magic money. If we try that, we ensure a global collapse due to the stable value of money becoming entirely destabilized. Doing that would send the world’s economies into a tailspin.
We need to reverse the effects of the upward wealth redistribution schemes we’ve allowed ourselves to be conned into adopting, as we have proved we learned nothing from history.
We’ve been here before, and our naivety cost us a world war to learn why making the rich richer at the expense of the poor was terrible.
The best way to make the rich richer is to concentrate on helping the poor become rich through their efforts to better themselves and their lives as they are so motivated. The rich will always benefit, but their benefits are long-term and stable if they invest in the people who make them rich instead of scheming to rip off the little people and pit us all against each other.
This is not rocket science. None of this is a mystery. We have had over a century of direct experience creating the economic problems we are dealing with today and solving these problems.
We could take the long-term route of making unions mandatory. We could restore economic equity in a few decades and start seeing the middle class grow again.
Or, we can institute UBI and dramatically change the dynamics of abuse between those with power and those without almost literally overnight. The additional bonus is that we save a lot of money when dealing with social issues by providing a comprehensive social safety net. We become far more successful in enriching the rich because hundreds of millions of people worldwide can pursue their initiatives and supercharge the capitalist economy with unprecedented levels of innovation, adding an immeasurable amount of value to the economy that would wipe out poverty across the globe much faster than re-empowering unions alone could accomplish.
Temet Nosce
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thotbag 