Hi Tapas. You're right...."banking" and "money" are the two biggest scams on the planet.
"Money", as others have noted here at Peak Oil.com, is actuaslly one of the most truly efficient ways of separating one'sself from one's responsibilities.
if I pay you to go out & kill someone, therefore I am (somehow) "not guilty" because I did not actually pull the trigger. It took the courts a long time to convince those WITH lotsa money that paying someone else to shoot someone was not a way of escaping the law, but the prinbciple satnds.
If I "pay" for some product, even though that product may be innocuous in and of itslef, I and therefore somehow "free of responsibility" for the making of that product, say in a sweat-shop in SE Asia (or other places in the Third World).
This is why the "love of money" is actually the "love of evading or eliminating personal resposibility".
Once the payment has been transacted, one need not have any more to do with the person from whom one has bought the product, and the vendor need not have anything more to do with you. As anyone who has ever purchased faulty goods can tell you.
This is why, even MORE than the Oil-Guzzling Motor vehicle, the love of money has introduced such separation between us humans at the very time when we need the opposite most.
What do I mean?
Well, consider who will be reading the peak oil .com forum. They may well be from every corner of the world...convenient, one might say, but disparate, in other words, thinking (mostly) alike, but so spread apart, geographically speaking, that we cannot get together, except in the most limited of fashions.
Consider the Oil industry - it has a similar wide-spread nature, BUT it can and does get together, because it has to - the oil exists in certain places, therefore if one wants to get at it, one must go there.
And meet. And try to learn to get along.
It's usually those who have the greatest "love of money" who can be most easily placated by the Oil companies, and usually such people have an unnerving habit of having a vast love of power, too. The Love Of Money may well also be described as "Success Worship". Success worship always leads to power worship, in the long term.
Tapas wrote:Then comes an individual with a very clever idea. He introduces the concept of money. He declares what a wonderful idea it would be if instead of trading 1 bag of wheat for 2 fishes, they decide to put a monetary value to all their goods. Just look at the convenience. If you price the bag of wheat for a dollar and the two fishes for a dollar, then it would be considered fair trade to get a bag of wheat if you had a dollar to pay for it, even though you may not have 2 fishes at the very moment.
Similarly, another person is free to get two fishes if he had a dollar in his possession, even though he may not have a bag of wheat to trade upfront.
It all seems like a brilliant idea does it not?
It seems like A CONVENIENT idea...it may, or may not, be seen as brilliant to those upon whom the plan is being foisted.
Most people would prefer to deal directly. Besides allowing a person to inspect the goods, before they trade, it give you a chance to have a natter (ie: have a talk with the other person).
Besides being far more fun than actually doing something, it alloows the average Joe to check out whether the "opposite number" is genuine or not.
The REAL pushers behind fiat currency, which is what you're describing, is the governments, who liked the idea of centralised taxation.
8. As the human population grew from 1 billion to 6.5 billion, not only did the potential for manual work increase 6.5 times, it actually increased by a factor of several hundred once you factor in the energy released from burning about 1 Trillion barrels of oil, coal and natural gas.
I'm now convinced that human population rose NOT because of better food or better medicine, but because of the need by poor people to "pay off" their loans - and the only way they could do that was to have more & more kids.
[quote} 13. Ultimately this flawed system has to collapse. This Ponzi scheme is dependent on perpetual growth. The point at where our energy peaks - meaning no more growth, will also mark the beginning of the collapse of our monetary system.[/quote]
Ponzi schemes are known as "Pyramid marketing schemes" here in Australia. Yup, you're right.
The ONLY way it can keep going is to force poor people to supply the only "currency" they can: children.
Expansion now = survival.
pity when it all stops expanding, eh?
