Humanity’s Greed has Two Possible Destinations: Anarchy or Gluttony.
Every time money goes through the business cycle, some of it gets pulled out. That disappearance does not come from paying wages. Wage-earners have needs as their primary concern and spend their money putting almost all of it back into the cycle. Wages make a business cycle possible. Profit-taking causes the disappearance, because it often transfers money into less liquid forms like savings, luxury assets, and other investments, tangible or otherwise.
Taking profit is natural for us so if money supply was finite, money would eventually run dry. A civilization without money is a civilization in anarchy. Humanity needs to print money to avoid that anarchy. A society with no money is the same as one without laws or government. If you question this, ask yourself, what would happen if a city’s finite food supply was coming to an end?
Empire forming is a form of profit taking. Whether it be the Nazis in World War II or the formation of Standard Oil’s monopoly, the drive to accumulate has always been within us. Alexander the Great did not conquer Asia Minor, Egypt, and Persia for the well-being of the conquered. What you can gain within your own market or borders is finite, so to keep accumulating you must expand or take from someone else. Even today, if a company has a lot of cash and its organic growth has slowed or there is a desire to further supplement it, another company is bought, which is equivalent to taking it from its previous owners. It is no different with the consequences of a finite money supply, if you have no way to get more yourself, you take someone else’s. That type of dynamic spreading throughout society, based on the idea of a finite money supply, results in anarchy because no one having money means government as no money either. The examples that range from Alexander the Great to USA’s former monopolies further solidify our consistent and inarguable disposition towards wanting more.
Our demand tendencies, like shown previously, are widely known and you most likely knew them before reading this, but I still hope you enjoyed this piece so far. Applying that indistinguishable human characteristic, greed, to a finite money supply highlights that behavior’s flaw. Money, which drives our economy and therefore civilization, can not ignore this flaw. However policy makers ignore our perpetual need for more, by providing infinite money which does not solve our greed but rather caters to it.
One could say desiring ascension is ambition, and ambition is not a flaw, and the speaker of that would be right, but ambition and greed are not the same thing. Greed is a flaw that is in line with the cardinal sin of gluttony, while ambition is more related to advancement, and even though it is often a pursuit for a reward, harmless ambition is commonplace, but infinite ambition veers into the realm of greed and gluttony. Money does not care about anything, so greed always naturally wins unless people, who unlike money have the ability to care, act to limit that behavior. Another example of greed’s macroeconomic consequences is a country that teeters on a line between being a sovereign nation or a narco-state, in that case human greed has led to an accumulation of money and power in a bad place. Just like the idiom we know about guns, money did not create that dilemma, people with money did. Wonder if the North and South’s economic situations were flipped during the Civil War era, and the Confederates were more powerful than the North in their protection of slavery. Money is not for or against slavery, and who knows where the USA and the world would be today if that prior statement was true. Again, money has no feelings, or care where it goes. Who has the money very much does care, so you want the right ethical people to be making economic decisions concerning it. Establishing ethical, virtuous economic goals would be the way to do this, then decisions would fall in line with achieving the goal, like bridging a wealth gap or changing the financial conditions of rogue markets.
It can not be stressed enough that we will be ourselves, as we have always been; greedy. Decisions made now concerning money supply disregard human behavior and instead act as if civilization is a car, and those at the Fed are mechanics. How nice it would be if the global economy was like a car in that there was a concrete answer to every situation. But maybe there is and today’s economists are just asking the wrong questions.
Inflation is not a natural occurrence, it is a manufactured consequence, and growth is not created by money. As proven before, money supply’s fundamental use is serving human greed, yet that greed is ignored while the byproducts of it, growth, inflation, or their opposites, remain the targets for decision makers. What money does is controlled by the people or institutions that have it. Money does not fuel growth, people do with how they invest it. Regardless of everything and anything, if the perfect source of energy was discovered the economic consequences would be enormous. Money is emitted but is not the emitter. An emitter is needed or the economy dies which would lead us to anarchy. This metaphor applies to all core fuels whether it be sunlight or oxygen. There needs to be an emitter which in that case would be the sun and trees respectively. The erroneous focus of just focusing on cash, which on its own can do nothing, making it more of an idea than a thing, is why this world’s money supply’s expansion is infinite. Nothing in reality is infinite, even nuclear isotopes will eventually decay.
Behavior and money supply can both be changed. There are many ways to steer the former with the quickest and strictest being laws. Money supply is manipulated through interest rates and government purchases of bonds. Changing interest rates does not change human nature, only the risk/reward dynamic of whatever decision a person is facing. But for every risk averse person there are risk neutrals who will act regardless. Does the government buying bonds increase your or my IQ or make us any more responsible or irresponsible? Of course not. No matter the money supply, our human behaviors, including greed, are present.
The dot-com bubble formed, stocks boomed then crashed in the late 1920s, meme stocks fly upwards today along with cryptocurrency’s volatile ascension. Those types of phenomenon that are all the product of greed and are financial/economic in scope, but gluttony also shows up again and again in history in the form of over-extension. Wonder if Japan never bombed Pearl Harbor and/or Hitler only waged war on only one front? The Roman Empire stretched from the Atlantic into the Middle East. Over-extension, the greed and lust for more power, has decided much of our history. However, it is not lost on anyone, nor myself, that greed is responsible for many positive accomplishments, but the never ending greed which is a flaw of humanity needs to be managed and not catered to. Catering to it are the present decision makers who come from an archaic school of thought who separate the people from the monetary policy. New thought knows that humanity’s characteristics exist in duality with the economy and need to be a part of any decision. The status quo fuels the insatiable appetite for riches, regardless of its consequence, and pumps monified air into troublesome bubbles that are growing as you read this.
Did anyone stop sub-prime mortgages or credit default swaps? The answer has already been provided on why they never stopped until they crashed. Right now, cryptocurrency has little to no use in society. Generating wealth is infinitely desired by society. A thing that has no meaningful tangible use has grown to have enormous value. That shows the market value of Bitcoin shows the value of acquiring wealth, since it is worth nothing else.
Then the question becomes, what is money worth if huge sums of it are thrown at something worthless? If inflation sparks you need even more of it, which, in that case, makes it an even huger deal to consumers. Needing more money is a stressor, because that signifies the bridge to wealth has gotten longer, and our greed takes more money to satisfy. Inflation makes the dollar cheaper, and money more important because your need for it increases. We solve inflation by trying to slow the expansion of money supply. But everyone needs more money, unless you don’t, so solving inflation that way does not really solve anything, because money is still needed while you are decreasing its availability. A better way would be decreasing the importance of money, the more you have, or the shorter the route to economic contentment (lower prices), the less important it is because your desires are being met. That is the modern viewpoint, a renaissance that focuses on people. You solve inflation and other concerns like bubbles by preventing them from happening. The fuel that makes them happen is greed, not money. Money serves people and therefore our greed. Ethical humanitarian economic policy focusing on our behavior as well as the economic environment is the only sensible solution. Greed is profit taking, and greed is what needs to be monitored and a focus of policy.
We’ve come a long way and have made an impenetrable case. Money creates great things if it is in the right place, and bad in the wrong. The USA already being a power when joining WWII tilted the balance of money to the right side of the fight. Money in the wrong place ends up with people wastefully taking vacations in orbit and enormous wealth gaps. To get our civilization to reflect the sentiment and ideology of the present times, our greed needs to be at the forefront of decision making. Conduct economic policy where the goal is decided first, then the mechanics and lawmakers keep society on that path towards it.
This only sounds ridiculous because you have not heard it before, but with our natural disposition being towards an eventual anarchy because of our infinite greed, with an infinite money supply protecting us from that end, addressing greed should be our primary concern rather than kneeling to it; as we do today. Look at the poor world. It is common knowledge that where there is poverty, there is more crime. When there is a shortage of money, the need to go take from others happens a lot faster, and taking is often violent. Catering to that behavior, instead of fixing it, as politicians and policymakers do today enables a bad trait to dictate the entirety of civilization.
How would we control greed? Greed is manifested through profiting and taking. There is a way to do it best that will take extensive study and research, but the simple answer is monitoring how much profit can be taken. Sounds incredibly harsh, but it is right in line with antitrust type of legislation. Legislating margins would just be another way of controlling growth. Not control a company’s horizontal growth across industries but its bank account growth and accumulation of power. That money not taken as profit would be money saved by consumers, given as wages to consumers, or otherwise invested back into society. The infinite money supply should be an intermittent one to fix the wealth gap and have the working man’s state of life reflect the positive changes in industry as much as the elites. As capitalist we need to have it so profit goals are worth shooting for, but at some point it becomes excessive.
