Under its present, and ages long, conceptual basis when has money not been a protection racket?
So far, We are NOT addressing the question of the claim of authority over what shall be the unit of account and how that creation shall be done. Apart from the fact that we are NOT addressing this illegitimate claim of power to establish and create an abstract unit of account, we are also not addressing the illiteracy of the insane notion that abstract representational units of account that will be used to represent the value of other things must somehow first exist before that function of recording the value of other things can occur. That is like thinking that the populace cannot count until the number creator has created the numbers that will be used to count.
The power dynamics that many describe, both with the issuing authority having been given to banks by governments along with the assumption of that authority by government in the first place, are secondary after the primary illegitimate and illiterate assumption itself that the populace has not challenged. The populace has gone along with these illegitimate and illiterate imperialist claims of power to control the creation of an abstract unit of acCount; and it is the additional assumption on the part of the imperialist that the populace is so stupid that they will never figure this shit out that then makes the imperialist confident it can impose taxes in the form of the illegitimate and illiterate creation of the unit of acCount. In fact, so long as the populace focuses on and discusses the interest rates of the bank created thing called money and/or focuses on the level of taxes imposed in that currency, then they are already going along with both the illegitimacy and the illiteracy!
The thing is that the populace, so far, is willing to assign or accept the assignment of "value" to the Abstract Unit of AcCount - unit of measure - as though it is something real unto itself without realizing that it is only an abstract representation/annotation unit used to call out/annotate/hold on the ledger the genuine value of other things. It is just numbers! So the populace has been assuming that an abstract conceptual tool for the facilitation of measuring and annotating the economic value of things is itself a thing of value, called out by itself, while they are also assuming that some "authority" must have and exercise the power to first create these things of value out of nothing - POOF! - before they can have any economic interchange! This kind of thinking has never been applied to any other unit of measure simply because it would easily be understood to be insane if, for example, a person was hoarding liters because they were more highly prized than gallons or inches because they were more highly valued than millimeters!
Yet here we are in the 21st Century thinking that dollars (or other monetary units) must be created by banks or governments before the populace can interact and that these magically created units are things of value that they themselves annotate in units of themselves!
Once you have gone into things like hegemonic control of the monetary unit, the interest rate of loaned into existence units, the "value" of this country's unit compared to another, the issuance of the units by some authority, the control and direction of the populace based on this kind of unit creation ahead of and apart from anything real that it will be used to represent - once you have gone into these kinds of dialog and analysis you are already WAY down the rabbit hole! And just because it has been going on for so long and been thought to be legitimate by so many does not make it either right or logical. At one time the entire educated and non-educated world thought that the earth was the center of the solar system. We are in a similar place when we assume the monetary unit must be a real thing all by itself and that it must pre-exist that which it will be used to represent and that some magical power exists with either governments or banks to create these magical units!
The thing about the militarism that is exerted with the use of this kind of illiterate money creation and the populace's acceptance of the units is that the populace does not want war but is accepting the "payment" in these units by the military for shit they would not otherwise provide to the military. The crazy thing about going along with all this nonsense is that the military folk are also delusional about the 'value' they have been "paid" with by this made up from nothing magical “authority”, but they are also willing to kick the asses of their own populace should that populace decide that they will no longer go along with all this shit.
So you and me and everyone else that is really NOT in line for all the evil empire shit and the military protection racket means by which it is backed up - we must all work to improve the monetary literacy of the populace such that everyone has the courage that the little kid had to call out the insanity in the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes.
Up till now, in the world of what we call the economy, all the real products and services along with their transaction between folk are
tracked/credited/accounted/recorded with accounting units that are also thought to be products all by themselves! So far, the populace has not challenged that illiterate notion and/or that the units of measure themselves need unit creators to conjure up - Poof! - with the flick of a pen or the stroke of a key on the keyboard!?? WTF kind of thinking is THAT!?
Some, well most, have not connected the dots from how we conceive and then structure money to how we destroy the environment, social capacity, and economic resilience. But when "monetization and commoditization" of economies are 'taught' in schools of economics most are not seeing the People and the naturale world as also being monetized and commoditized, so we fail to see how our concept of money is dragging us and the natural world into hell.
Here is one telling of the history of colonization
From the abstract:
“In the European colonies, land expropriation and forced labor were used, but another important means of forcing indigenous populations to work as wage-laborers or produce cash crops was taxation and the requirement that taxes be paid in colonial currency. This paper provides an overview of this method, and documents its historical importance, concentrating on Africa. Taxation also played an important role in the monetization and commoditization of African economies, and in the rise of a peripheral capitalism. As the paper demonstrates, Marx was not unaware of money taxes functioning in this manner, and the phenomenon was in no way limited to Africa.” - Matthew Forstater
From the above paper by Forstater: ".... The problem was that if the subsistence base was capable of supporting the population entirely, colonial subjects would not be compelled to offer their labor-power for sale. Colonial governments thus required alternative means for compelling the population to work for wages. The historical record is clear that one very important method for accomplishing this was to impose a tax and require that the tax obligation be settled in colonial currency.
This method had the benefit of not only forcing people to work for wages, but also of creating a value for the colonial currency and monetizing the colony. In addition, this method could be used to force the population to produce cash crops for sale. What the population had to do to obtain the currency was entirely at the discretion of the colonial government, since it was the sole source of the colonial currency. This method was widespread and important enough to be called “a secret of colonial capitalist primitive accumulation” (since it was not the only method, it must be called “a” secret). This practice is extremely well documented, yet it has hardly ever been mentioned as an important method of primitive accumulation."
"......Several points concerning the role of direct taxation in colonial capitalist primitive accumulation need to be made. First, direct taxation means that the tax cannot be, e.g. an income tax. An income tax cannot assure that a population that possesses the means of production to produce their own subsistence will enter wage labor or grow cash crops. If they simply continue to engage in subsistence production, they can avoid the cash economy and thus escape the income tax and any need for colonial currency. The tax must therefore be a direct tax, such as the poll tax, hut tax, head tax, wife tax, and land tax. Second, although taxation was often imposed in the name of securing revenue for the colonial coffers, and the tax was justified in the name of Africans bearing some of the financial burden of running the colonial state, in fact the colonial government did not need the colonial currency held by Africans."
"....The requirement that taxes be paid in colonial currency rather than in-kind was
essential to producing the desired outcome,...."
Since colonial times we have remained faithful servants to an illiterate and impossible system of imposed make believe.
No amount of bitching about the rate or level of taxes addresses the first illegitimate claim by government to “issue” acCounting units or its handing off of this process to banks.
The coin of the realm is itself a means of enslavement.
It is the math of money (as presently conceived and structured) that should have told us that when everything is linked (monetized & commoditized) to inherent instability then everything, including community capacity and coherence, future generations, the natural world, will get sacrificed in vain attempts to respond to the illiterate imperatives of money (NOT part of the natural world) that remain unquestioned at the conceptual level.
In addition to the above-mentioned illiterate and unnecessary sacrifices one must also include the nonsense of war and the attempts to control those natural resources and using the further imposition of the same illiteracy about currency from one nation over another! Talk about compound illiteracy! Now every country is using this 'operating system' for control of the populace within its borders (as if that is not bad enough!) ...trouble is that the fighting between countries is so illiterate that countries are going to war over nonsense conceptual make believe!
We are killing each other over monetary illiteracy!
We must challenge the colonially imposed assumption of some kind of magical power over "issuance", whether by some magical sovereign or some magical 'private issuer' (banks) of abstract units for the purpose of the measure and representation of value interchange amongst a populace. To continue this practice is the continued repeat of an extreme, colonially imposed, illiteracy about abstract representation in general, and basic illiteracy from the colonizers about unit based systems of bookkeeping about economic value interchange when assuming that the unit of measure of value is also an item of value (within that economic value interchange) all by itself.
The moral wrangling inside the failings of applied math literacy and logical shortcomings of money will one day be just a joke about a truly foolish and mathematically illiterate populace.
Here is a presentation in which the AI called Grok, under strict requirements for provable analysis, is used to explicitly confirm the ages old errors and the correction presented by Marc Gauvin & the MSTA:
Michael Hudson, how is it that your analysis does not question the legitimacy of the imperial control over the conceptual and then structural installation of the thing we call money.
In ancient times the temple priests told the peasantry who came to make their offerings to God that the offerings brought by the peasants were not acceptable to God. The priests told the people they needed to take the coins, that only the priests issued, and leave the Real Goods that the peasants had brought to the temple with the priests, go lay the coins on the altar because that was acceptable to God, and then go home. The original claims of 'authority' about ‘money’ by the temple priests is where the eventual claim of authority about money by government originated.
Graeber and the history of coins and money and their connection to militarism.
Do you know how much of 'the economy' of the USA and other places is captured and dedicated to war in this way?
But the claim of 'authority' is nonsense, and so is the system of money itself; since what is real is the wealth of a people, and money is made up nonsense that the people have been told is real (acceptable to god). It's a long history of lies and deception. It is like unto the miss use of genuine authority as egregious as telling kids lies!
We are not going to get out of this mess while using the very system instituted ages ago to enslave and deceive and steal.
But since colonial times we have remained faithful servants to an illiterate and impossible system of imposed make believe.
Now every country is using this 'operating system' for control of the populace within its borders (as if that is not bad enough!) ...trouble is that the fighting between countries is so illiterate that countries are going to war over nonsense conceptual make believe!
We are killing each other over monetary illiteracy!
We must all bring up the question of Money As A System and its effect on the social order. When empires rise and fall within this ill-conceived system we seem unable to stop "the bad guys." But what if the bad guys' agenda is only facilitated by the way we collectively conceive of and then do money itself?
In the ME the US has become a protection racket just like those run by the Mafia.
Iran wants to stop this and could be seen to be acting like Eliot Ness’s ‘Untouchables’ in 1930s Chicago.
I think once again the Untouchables will come out on top. I sincerely hope so.
Under its present, and ages long, conceptual basis when has money not been a protection racket?
So far, We are NOT addressing the question of the claim of authority over what shall be the unit of account and how that creation shall be done. Apart from the fact that we are NOT addressing this illegitimate claim of power to establish and create an abstract unit of account, we are also not addressing the illiteracy of the insane notion that abstract representational units of account that will be used to represent the value of other things must somehow first exist before that function of recording the value of other things can occur. That is like thinking that the populace cannot count until the number creator has created the numbers that will be used to count.
The power dynamics that many describe, both with the issuing authority having been given to banks by governments along with the assumption of that authority by government in the first place, are secondary after the primary illegitimate and illiterate assumption itself that the populace has not challenged. The populace has gone along with these illegitimate and illiterate imperialist claims of power to control the creation of an abstract unit of acCount; and it is the additional assumption on the part of the imperialist that the populace is so stupid that they will never figure this shit out that then makes the imperialist confident it can impose taxes in the form of the illegitimate and illiterate creation of the unit of acCount. In fact, so long as the populace focuses on and discusses the interest rates of the bank created thing called money and/or focuses on the level of taxes imposed in that currency, then they are already going along with both the illegitimacy and the illiteracy!
The thing is that the populace, so far, is willing to assign or accept the assignment of "value" to the Abstract Unit of AcCount - unit of measure - as though it is something real unto itself without realizing that it is only an abstract representation/annotation unit used to call out/annotate/hold on the ledger the genuine value of other things. It is just numbers! So the populace has been assuming that an abstract conceptual tool for the facilitation of measuring and annotating the economic value of things is itself a thing of value, called out by itself, while they are also assuming that some "authority" must have and exercise the power to first create these things of value out of nothing - POOF! - before they can have any economic interchange! This kind of thinking has never been applied to any other unit of measure simply because it would easily be understood to be insane if, for example, a person was hoarding liters because they were more highly prized than gallons or inches because they were more highly valued than millimeters!
Yet here we are in the 21st Century thinking that dollars (or other monetary units) must be created by banks or governments before the populace can interact and that these magically created units are things of value that they themselves annotate in units of themselves!
Once you have gone into things like hegemonic control of the monetary unit, the interest rate of loaned into existence units, the "value" of this country's unit compared to another, the issuance of the units by some authority, the control and direction of the populace based on this kind of unit creation ahead of and apart from anything real that it will be used to represent - once you have gone into these kinds of dialog and analysis you are already WAY down the rabbit hole! And just because it has been going on for so long and been thought to be legitimate by so many does not make it either right or logical. At one time the entire educated and non-educated world thought that the earth was the center of the solar system. We are in a similar place when we assume the monetary unit must be a real thing all by itself and that it must pre-exist that which it will be used to represent and that some magical power exists with either governments or banks to create these magical units!
The thing about the militarism that is exerted with the use of this kind of illiterate money creation and the populace's acceptance of the units is that the populace does not want war but is accepting the "payment" in these units by the military for shit they would not otherwise provide to the military. The crazy thing about going along with all this nonsense is that the military folk are also delusional about the 'value' they have been "paid" with by this made up from nothing magical “authority”, but they are also willing to kick the asses of their own populace should that populace decide that they will no longer go along with all this shit.
So you and me and everyone else that is really NOT in line for all the evil empire shit and the military protection racket means by which it is backed up - we must all work to improve the monetary literacy of the populace such that everyone has the courage that the little kid had to call out the insanity in the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes.
Up till now, in the world of what we call the economy, all the real products and services along with their transaction between folk are
tracked/credited/accounted/recorded with accounting units that are also thought to be products all by themselves! So far, the populace has not challenged that illiterate notion and/or that the units of measure themselves need unit creators to conjure up - Poof! - with the flick of a pen or the stroke of a key on the keyboard!?? WTF kind of thinking is THAT!?
This goes way deeper than cash vs digital......
https://bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/300-you-have-been-served
Some, well most, have not connected the dots from how we conceive and then structure money to how we destroy the environment, social capacity, and economic resilience. But when "monetization and commoditization" of economies are 'taught' in schools of economics most are not seeing the People and the naturale world as also being monetized and commoditized, so we fail to see how our concept of money is dragging us and the natural world into hell.
Here is one telling of the history of colonization
From the abstract:
“In the European colonies, land expropriation and forced labor were used, but another important means of forcing indigenous populations to work as wage-laborers or produce cash crops was taxation and the requirement that taxes be paid in colonial currency. This paper provides an overview of this method, and documents its historical importance, concentrating on Africa. Taxation also played an important role in the monetization and commoditization of African economies, and in the rise of a peripheral capitalism. As the paper demonstrates, Marx was not unaware of money taxes functioning in this manner, and the phenomenon was in no way limited to Africa.” - Matthew Forstater
From the above paper by Forstater: ".... The problem was that if the subsistence base was capable of supporting the population entirely, colonial subjects would not be compelled to offer their labor-power for sale. Colonial governments thus required alternative means for compelling the population to work for wages. The historical record is clear that one very important method for accomplishing this was to impose a tax and require that the tax obligation be settled in colonial currency.
This method had the benefit of not only forcing people to work for wages, but also of creating a value for the colonial currency and monetizing the colony. In addition, this method could be used to force the population to produce cash crops for sale. What the population had to do to obtain the currency was entirely at the discretion of the colonial government, since it was the sole source of the colonial currency. This method was widespread and important enough to be called “a secret of colonial capitalist primitive accumulation” (since it was not the only method, it must be called “a” secret). This practice is extremely well documented, yet it has hardly ever been mentioned as an important method of primitive accumulation."
"......Several points concerning the role of direct taxation in colonial capitalist primitive accumulation need to be made. First, direct taxation means that the tax cannot be, e.g. an income tax. An income tax cannot assure that a population that possesses the means of production to produce their own subsistence will enter wage labor or grow cash crops. If they simply continue to engage in subsistence production, they can avoid the cash economy and thus escape the income tax and any need for colonial currency. The tax must therefore be a direct tax, such as the poll tax, hut tax, head tax, wife tax, and land tax. Second, although taxation was often imposed in the name of securing revenue for the colonial coffers, and the tax was justified in the name of Africans bearing some of the financial burden of running the colonial state, in fact the colonial government did not need the colonial currency held by Africans."
"....The requirement that taxes be paid in colonial currency rather than in-kind was
essential to producing the desired outcome,...."
Since colonial times we have remained faithful servants to an illiterate and impossible system of imposed make believe.
No amount of bitching about the rate or level of taxes addresses the first illegitimate claim by government to “issue” acCounting units or its handing off of this process to banks.
The coin of the realm is itself a means of enslavement.
It is the math of money (as presently conceived and structured) that should have told us that when everything is linked (monetized & commoditized) to inherent instability then everything, including community capacity and coherence, future generations, the natural world, will get sacrificed in vain attempts to respond to the illiterate imperatives of money (NOT part of the natural world) that remain unquestioned at the conceptual level.
In addition to the above-mentioned illiterate and unnecessary sacrifices one must also include the nonsense of war and the attempts to control those natural resources and using the further imposition of the same illiteracy about currency from one nation over another! Talk about compound illiteracy! Now every country is using this 'operating system' for control of the populace within its borders (as if that is not bad enough!) ...trouble is that the fighting between countries is so illiterate that countries are going to war over nonsense conceptual make believe!
We are killing each other over monetary illiteracy!
Let's stop this!
https://bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/299-stop-wwiii
We must challenge the colonially imposed assumption of some kind of magical power over "issuance", whether by some magical sovereign or some magical 'private issuer' (banks) of abstract units for the purpose of the measure and representation of value interchange amongst a populace. To continue this practice is the continued repeat of an extreme, colonially imposed, illiteracy about abstract representation in general, and basic illiteracy from the colonizers about unit based systems of bookkeeping about economic value interchange when assuming that the unit of measure of value is also an item of value (within that economic value interchange) all by itself.
The moral wrangling inside the failings of applied math literacy and logical shortcomings of money will one day be just a joke about a truly foolish and mathematically illiterate populace.
Here is a presentation in which the AI called Grok, under strict requirements for provable analysis, is used to explicitly confirm the ages old errors and the correction presented by Marc Gauvin & the MSTA:
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_6ed64a55-dd77-4dd5-832e-2fbadea4c532
One day the exceedingly long Age Of Monetary Illiteracy will come to an end.
https://bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/299-stop-wwiii
Michael Hudson, how is it that your analysis does not question the legitimacy of the imperial control over the conceptual and then structural installation of the thing we call money.
In ancient times the temple priests told the peasantry who came to make their offerings to God that the offerings brought by the peasants were not acceptable to God. The priests told the people they needed to take the coins, that only the priests issued, and leave the Real Goods that the peasants had brought to the temple with the priests, go lay the coins on the altar because that was acceptable to God, and then go home. The original claims of 'authority' about ‘money’ by the temple priests is where the eventual claim of authority about money by government originated.
Graeber and the history of coins and money and their connection to militarism.
Listen from 42:06 to 47:10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs&t=2534s
Do you know how much of 'the economy' of the USA and other places is captured and dedicated to war in this way?
But the claim of 'authority' is nonsense, and so is the system of money itself; since what is real is the wealth of a people, and money is made up nonsense that the people have been told is real (acceptable to god). It's a long history of lies and deception. It is like unto the miss use of genuine authority as egregious as telling kids lies!
We are not going to get out of this mess while using the very system instituted ages ago to enslave and deceive and steal.
But since colonial times we have remained faithful servants to an illiterate and impossible system of imposed make believe.
Now every country is using this 'operating system' for control of the populace within its borders (as if that is not bad enough!) ...trouble is that the fighting between countries is so illiterate that countries are going to war over nonsense conceptual make believe!
We are killing each other over monetary illiteracy!
Let's stop this!
https://bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/299-stop-wwiii
We must all bring up the question of Money As A System and its effect on the social order. When empires rise and fall within this ill-conceived system we seem unable to stop "the bad guys." But what if the bad guys' agenda is only facilitated by the way we collectively conceive of and then do money itself?