Humane Money 1

There is a strong tendency for people to confuse the things that represent money with money itself. Analagously, for instance, I feel fairly certain you might be a bit disappointed if I offered you a piece of cake only to give you a piece of paper with part of the word 'cake' written on it. Oh? would you like some coffee with that? I could argue that I fulfilled my promise, but you might feel a bit swindled. Yet if I give you some pieces of paper with pictures of dead people on them, you are quite likely happy and believe I've actually given you money! And so long as enough other people go along with the gag, it seems as if I have given you money!! So pervasive is this gag that it becomes very natural to not distinguish the representation of money from money itself.

So What Is Money?

Conventionally, it's broken down to:

• a medium of exchange,
• a unit of account, and
• a store of value

All three are clearly just different functions. Functions of something more fundamental. We can't say the more fundamental something is any one of the traditional commodities, like pretty stones or cattle. Nor can we say it’s any of the more modern intangible commodities, like pieces of paper or the records kept in either centralized or blockchained spreadsheets. Neither the old time taking monkeys to market nor the new time numerical monkey business satisfies the what-is-money question in a satisfactory way. It's neither the functions of money, nor the representations of money that provide a satisfactory answer.

Wait a sec; when push comes to shove, don't the functions really define what a something is?

If your boss says, "Go get me something so I can pound this nail in", you now know the function the tool is to perform, but do you know what the tool is? A 10 mm combination wrench, perhaps? Maybe a rolled up newspaper? So it seems that a function does not fully define the tool - there is something larger involved. Likewise, if you present your boss with a drawing of some tool - a representation - she is unlikely to be pleased.

So, what is money? It's more than the conventional list of functions and it's more than its historical and current representations. Perhaps because money is not a physical thing like the hammer your boss sent you to fetch, we can define money only in terms of functions. Yet the conventional functions listed above are not enough to fully capture the nature of money. So perhaps we need to look at the function of the functions - the meta-function, so to say.

Good grief, you might groan. So OK, what's this meta-function thing?

If we inspect the conventional function list, above, we see one thing each element has in common. They each reflect information about relative economic positions and transactions. Therefore, what we see is that money is nothing other than information. And when that information is exchanged, what we have is communication. But from a practical point of view, information that is not exchanged is equivalent to no information at all. True, it may be there somewhere, hidden away, but if it is not recognized, if it is not observed, it is as if it simply doesn't exist. This is just the same as if I had a great, world improving, thought, but never expressed it in any way; it would amount to nothing. Likewise with money - it effectively doesn't exist until used for communication.

So, ultimately, money is nothing more than a form of communication. It is one person talking to another about economic demands and economic services. It is the language which enables us to rapidly and easily exchange services across the globe with total strangers, and, likewise, even within local communities with known vendors and known customers. The pretty stones and cattle that once served as tokens representing money right up through the fiat and cryptocurrency money of today are merely conventions that have developed over the ages to serve as records of economic information, of economic conversations.

So What?

The right to express yourself responsibly is enshrined in many charters of human rights, e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 19, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression", or the 1st amendment to the USA constitution "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech". Yet the right to express yourself with money, which is a medium of communication, of speech, is now severely limited. This is so because it is only granted within strict and narrow limits to people who have first painfully served the desires of one master or another - even if that pain was accepted voluntarily.

In other words, first the work, then the money (i.e., the right to communicate). Or, put another way, no talking before you first dig the ditch and only then according to a meager permission to speak granted by the loud mouthed lords and ladies living in the big house on the hill.

Nice.