Money Changers

It seems as if we, the public, are paralyzed while we watch the largest bank heist in history. Making this perhaps an opportune moment to ask, what is money? It is not an easy question. Indeed, the great anguish experienced from trying to answer it has driven many otherwise intelligent people to argue that money is, or should be, some kind of fixed commodity, like gold. A tangible good. But money, unfortunately or fortunately as may be, cannot be pinned down that way because money is only an idea.

We can estimate — with a certain practical accuracy — how much money exists. Within approximate boundaries we can create more of it and we can reduce its supply. But to put it on a somewhat arbitrary scale, money is an idea much more akin to patriotism and much less like the number π.

As everybody knows, faith and confidence in the dollar is bound up with faith and confidence in the U.S. government. But what we tend to forget is that, more fundamentally, faith and confidence in the dollar depends on most people who use dollars having more or less the same idea regarding what a dollar means. From that perspective, when a small sub-group of people have a very different idea, who believe that when they create dollars out of thin air that those dollars belong to them and — more to the point — that other people shouldn't have any, we've got a serious problem. When the U.S. government then sides with the crooks it's no longer just a serious problem, but an existential crisis.

Somehow banking, over the course of the past several decades, evolved from a service industry into the collection of what can only be called, to use quaint economic terminology, "rents." Rack-rent, for example, occasionally in the past set off revolutions. Political economists and others used to argue incessantly about "rents," fair or unfair, and what to do about them. We've lost track of that public discourse and now it almost seems as if we've wandered into virgin territory where we don't possess a vocabulary that adequately describes what's happening on Wall Street. But all we really need are the same words used by nineteenth and twentieth century revolutionaries: questions about justice, about ending human squalor, about having a living wage. And about curtailing "rents."

The right has nourished the fear that Barack Obama may be a secret left-wing revolutionary. In fact, however, he's acting exactly like a secret right-wing revolutionary through his willingness to turn over absolute control of our economy to unaccountable Wall Street shysters. What he's doing, in scale and in terms of precedent, surpasses — by one or two orders of magnitude — the former Tyrant's worst economic excess.

Will people see or understand this tectonic shift in our social covenant? What will people do about it??