OF MONEY AND ITS USE

Money is a type of universal tool of exchange amongst any group of people as well as a representation of the basic efforts, needs and wants of these people and the things that they value generally as well as their material possessions, it also represents their ability to accumulate and expand their interests in the ways that I have just mentioned above through this universal tool of utility. In the past the monetary system was created to replace the clumsy barter system of trade, this barter system of trade that existed before the monetary system was useful if a person A had something they wanted to trade or barter that people wanted, but it was useless if this same person A had things that a person B did not want or need, yet person B had something that person A wanted or needed. Even though needs and wants overlap, they are not exactly the same in entirety, for example, we can want food and need it to survive, but we can want jewellery, yet not necessarily need it to survive, some items, such as books are wants, but they are also needed for the knowledge contained in them. If one was stranded on a desert island, then food and water would be a need and a want, whereas more jewellery would be a want and not a need. The artificial value that is placed on objects like gold and silver exists because these substances are relatively permanent and pliable, they can be melted, cut, weighed and exchanged with ease. The type of value that objects like gold and silver have for us, I call artificial values, this is because not all people and animals value gold and silver, it is not a natural value, such as, food, water or morality. The desire for Morality is a natural value, because if someone harms someone we love, then we naturally feel the pain of this act, so it is likewise natural for us to create morals as well as a code of ethics and a set of laws to counteract this natural pain that we would feel if our loved ones were to be harmed or cheated in some way. We naturally need food and water to survive so we think of these things as natural values. Money, when it was first created as a concept and as a tool of exchange, began as a representation of one's efforts, property and belonging's in a fair and straightforward way, then over a period of time money lost its value as a real representation of what I have just mentioned above and slowly became more illusionary and divorced from its original purpose, it can even be said that money became an illusion due to usury and the concept of fiat money. Only about 3% of the money in circulation today represents the things it is supposed to represent, the other 97% mostly exists as numbers in computers. There is never enough money in circulation to represent all the things that it is meant to represent. Many of the interesting modern philosophical discussions occurring today concerns the merits as well as the disadvantages of the monetary system itself. The Austrian school of economics and its followers display a lot of optimism in the potential of a gold backed monetary system, whereas you also get the futurist idealists who prefer any kind of paradigm shift that enables us to discard the flawed monetary system altogether, with its long history of corruption and differential advantage. It seems that the need to use tangible money will become an outmoded thing of the past, seeing as how technology is finding ways to overcome this aspect of its use. I think that electronic money when it becomes introduced into the system will over time become something else, money will eventually become a type of universal number credit system, it will be either in negative numbers, if you are in debt or positive, if you are in positive credit, etc. Money now has become mostly a tool of manipulation and control that the elite classes of bankers, financiers, business people and upper classes use to serve their own interests at everyone else's expense. Money has become and is now a complete illusion as a fair representation of the endeavours of the masses and their own interests. The world is like a confusing playground in which people are slowly beginning to realize is becoming an uncontrollable situation of meaningless behaviour due to a scarcity of jobs and opportunities, a manipulation of the masses by the power hungry elite classes, a rapid and constant population increase, many people competing against technology for opportunities, people competing against other people and their greed for money and profit due to the outsourcing of jobs and opportunities, many people are also losing their sense of religious and mystical beliefs in any higher powers or universal objective meanings, etc., all these things and more add to the confusion and uncertainty of the world we currently live in. It is science, philosophy, reason and morality and some fair democratic and egalitarian politics for all people in the world generally that will be the saving graces of humanity in the long run.