4 of 10

Write now Article Tools

What IS the economy, anyway? My consideration of this question has gone through many stages. The first was a completely intimidated avoidance of the subject altogether. I thought that all of these matters of banking and saving, lending and interest, investing and margins, macro and micro, supply and demand, and myriad other aspects and sub-aspects of this THING called "the economy", not to mention the often in-apt terminology that lends itself (har har) to misunderstanding and misinterpretation by the uninitiated or layperson, were simply too sophisticated and obscure for a "hand-to-mouth" consumer such as I am, to contemplate - much less comprehend.

My next stage in considering this "economy" centered around, and remains obsessed with, the concept of money. In this second stage, I naively assumed that, above all, whether spent and saved by the lone consumer, or wheeled and dealed at the highest levels of conglomerate enterprise, money remained first and foremost - no, *exclusively* - a mere medium of exchange. Oh, I surely recognized that the representational nature of money carried an inherant risk of interpretative fluctuation in value - a gallon of gasoline "costs" $2.29 at one filling station, and $2.19 at its competitor across the street - and $2.29 in January '09 but $4.79 little over a year before. But despite these sometimes stark variations, it remained, in my mind anyway, a fair and honest tool for exchanging goods and services. I thought that money - despite the sometimes dishonest behavior of some of its beholders (or wanna-be beholders!) was fundamentally neutral. I used to believe that "money" isn't the problem - it's people. I misunderstood it conceptually to be a mere SUBSTITUTE for fairly and equally exchanged products of any and all of our constructive hands. I understood it to be a merely convenient way to transport the *representative value* of, say, a horse or a Hyundai - or a house.

The third stage in my understanding of the dollar, and it's counterparts all across the industrialized globe, asked a simple question: Did that "Joe CEO" *really* do two billion dollars of "work" as defined identically (if I had my way, anyway) by economists and physicists alike? Does the beholder of these calloused and rough and hardened hands have the prosperity and security to show for their lifetime of work that is had in abundance by the beholder of those soft and manicured hands , the latter of whom probably owns more homes than the former has days off

• 1
• 2
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about The money system: Greed prevails?
We want to hear your view. Write now!