About Money

I rarely keep track of current events, least of all global affairs. Today I learned that Greece was on the verge of bankruptcy. A nation, or at least a government, can go bankrupt...


The concept of money, and the perceived necessity of it, is something I have for the longest time failed to understand. Where the hell does it all come from? What's it based on? I remember it used to be based on the value of gold a country had deposited, or something like that. Then, in the U.S. at least, there was 'fiat' money - pieces of paper that had held value because the government said it did :/


The United States is in a tremendous amount of debt. Over 7 trillion last time I paid attention? (which, I admit, was a very long time ago) Yet, it continues to spend money it doesn't have and borrow from other countries, themselves in considerable debt. And they sell bonds, basically loans, with the dubious promise of paying them back with interest, if and when they build up enough revenue to do so, in the process only increasing the debt. Is this about accurate? How does this money circulate? How do these countries continue to lend and spend money they technically should not have? I may just be showing my naivety towards global economics. If there's someone out there who can shed light on this to me, by all means.


And then you look at the microeconomics. Hundreds of thousands of people spending beyond their means. People who can barely keep track of their expenses to begin with, and then buy things they can't afford, take out credit cards and just start piling debt. And trickle down economics, was it? You know what people with money do when they get more money? Use that money to try to get even more money. CDs, properties, stocks, invest invest invest.


Money and how it affects the society we live in - to me it seems one of the most illogical concepts of our current existence. Sometimes I am just baffled to the point of being made dumb. Everyone wants, and everything costs, and so a system has been set up where an arbitrary tangible item holding intangible value has been made a necessity of everyday living. And it has been accepted by the vast, vast majority of sentient beings.


I wish I had an answer, a solution to this broken system. Here, I break my tendency to speak passively. This system is broken, and it makes no sense to me, and I am dumbfounded how it makes sense to anyone else. In fact, I don't think it does. People only try and invent ways to validate it. Some are pretty creative about how they do it, even childishly so.


I don't have an answer. Only an ideal, and a useless one at that. I will not share it, no one will find any validity in it. I will be the first to admit that it will never work. For it is, in essence, a socialist ideal, and there is no hope for socialism in this world, not with the current state of society.


I am not stupid enough to think I could live without money. I recognize its necessity, but only because the entire world assumes it, and live blindly according to this assumption.