When you have too many people for barter to be practical, you invent tokens, things or images that represent something else, rather like a sophisticated I.O.U system. Seeing as history only began to be written relatively recently, i.e a few thousands years, I can only imagine the arguments that ensued when the first forgers hit this world. Throwing stone-age farming implements to the ground to take up a bone chisel and score a simple mark on a shiny pebble. Before you know it they're living the proverbial life of Riley, perhaps not with all the latest mod cons, but with more animal skins than they'll ever need to keep the cave warm and toasty, a nice rack of finely carved wooden clubs, a herd of goats, and a small workforce of hairy dupes to do their bidding. It makes you think, how did our earliest tyrants and dictators evolve from mere local village bullies. How on earth did any early civilisation get started, that is, unless someone cheated along the way.
The biggest problem that most of us have with money, apart from not owning any, is that how few of us have so much of it. A slim percentage of civilisation hoard the lion's share, rather like emperors of old. My outspoken beliefs on the subject of money have dropped a few jaws in the past, especially whilst living in London, A city that crawls with the rich who until recently would pay staff to usher people like me out of the door whilst laughing amongst themselves from the comfort of sumptuous leather seating. Things have changed, don't get me wrong, I'm still not welcome anywhere prestigious, I have the dress sense, the pallor and general upstartedness of someone with little to show for himself, at least financially. They will still boot me out, or more likely keep me at a good distance from the front door. However no one, no matter how rich they are would disagree with my long held belief that the Stock Market is nothing more than a betting shop. The stakes are higher, the thoroughbreds are corporations and commodities, but the principle is more or less the same. You study the form, you take a punt.
As usual watching the world catch up with one of my many spurious opinions, this time via a painful recession, doesn't afford me any personal satisfaction, it's sad really, how the inevitable trundles along like a stubborn mule dragging a broken down cart, they get there in the end, but neither the journey nor the destination are particularly enlightening. So here's another favourite of mine, there is no such thing as money, it isn't there, it's simply a complicated system of the wealthiest hoarding their treasure troves of I.O.U's. Eventually the world will wake up and realise there just isn't enough on our tiny planet for the immoral minority of the super rich to spend it on, there are after all only so many luxury yachts and trips to the moon our natural resources can bear before we'll all be scrabbling around the rubbish tips trying to salvage what we can at the very zenith of humanity. Let's use a comparison, a rather simple one and that is coal.
For tens of thousands of years Man lived was forced to live within his limits. He could see how many trees were left to burn to keep warm and cook up some Woolly Mammoth steaks before he and his tribe would have to move on. Sure, it's not a perfect system, but it still sustained the human race and Earth for aeons. Then one day he discovered fossil fuels, coal was literally lying around on the ground in many parts of the world, a few simple tools and he was set. The fact is that coal and oil are equivalent to receiving thousands of years of energy from the sun, made up from rotten flora, fauna and animals devastated by some natural disaster millions of years ago. Oil would prove to be more tricky, it would be a very long while before Man could tap into the deepest reserves, and in the meantime he came up with a few solutions based on some of the most twisted and evil logic our race has ever encountered. He'd use people. Slaves. Slavery did more than demean Mankind, it also held back the development of alternative technologies. One of those being the extraction and refinement of oil. Eventually, due to the need to continually pump out water from yet deeper and deeper coal mines he stumbled across steam power, and soon the Industrial Age was upon us.
However oil was the real turning point, it meant that rather than enslave his fellow Man, he could afford to live a more just existence, using technology of his own making, powered by the incredible energy harnessed within this black and slimy substance to, without being dramatic, conquer the world. Oil brought about more freedoms than anyone could have ever imagined. Take a look around you, the plastic casings of every piece of technology in your house, the contents of your bathroom cabinet, the carpet, the rug, the paint on your walls and doors, almost everything has either been produced via the enormous power of oil or even contains a bi-product of oil. Everything is oil, oil is the greatest I.O.U the human race has ever written, and it's nearly time to pay up. The day we run out of oil you may as well burn your money to keep warm, because it won't be worth a penny, not even symbolically. Right now the USD$ is worth around 4 cents, this is its true value, not a made-up value based upon the money markets, not a speculative stab in the dark by a jaded banker, but its real and honest value. Inflation was invented to cover up the fact that as governments print more and more money to fund more and more so-called economic growth it loses its value. Asides human beings, money is the only other thing on this planet that continues to increase in supply, all natural resources are depleting, as are most animals, fish, plants, and even clean air and water, and of course fossil fuels.
We are busted, the kitty is empty, the piggy bank lies shattered in pieces on the ground, and soon all we will be able to buy with plastic is more plastic. In the meantime, we might all be able to learn a lesson or two about what to do with our money in the near future from Mark Wagner. This must be the last man on earth still having fun with currency, asides the hoardes of origami nuts that abound on the net. If you love money you might want to turn away now, this is going to be painful for you. As for me, I call it creative accountancy.
