Economists and theorists of money describe it using the following 3 functions: - unit of measure - store of value - medium of exchange As a **unit of measure**, it's pretty useless, when you think about it. The same amount of money will buy you different things in different countries. $10 goes a long way in rural India. It will hardly get you anything in the heart of Paris. Would you use a ruler that contracted or expanded depending on where you use it? Is it any better as a **store of value**? It would seem so, since most of us keep our savings in money. However, if you study history, most currencies are not very long-lasting. Most succumb to inflation at some point. It has the illusion of being a good store of value, but even modestly-informed people have the notion that real estate would be a much better store of value, which is why most people are willing to go into debt in order to buy a house. This might also be why the image of someone's grandmother storing cash under a mattress seems so parochial and absurd. Money makes most sense as a **medium of exchange**. We can convert most things into money, and can convert money back into more things than any single mind could fathom. We can even convert intangible services into money, and back again. Money performs this service so well, that we've come to believe it is the only thing that can serve as a medium of exchange. We believe that money replaced barter trade because that was the only way our economies could grow and our societies become more complex and sophisticated. There would be no way, we imagine, to build a passenger airplane without money. Money has gained extraordinary power and influence through the amalgamation of these 3 types of functions, and those who have amassed great wealth have used this confusion to their advantage. In a capitalist system, the fact that money obfuscates the distinction between these functions is why it has been the perfect camouflage for what is really going on - transfers of power. When we buy something, we have the illusion that we are making an equal exchange. If a person buys a dress for $10, or $50, or $1000, regardless of the price, if they are willing to make that trade, then they believe it is a fair and equal trade. However, what is really happening is that one store of value is being traded for another. A dress is being traded for cash. At a deeper level, and what really matters, is that power is being exchanged, since a store of value is only worth what you can use it for in the future. By this measure, money is more powerful than a dress. A dress has only a few functions. Money can be used for almost any purpose its holder wishes for it. Money has the power of optionality, which in today's economic reality is the ultimate superpower, or what Daniel Schmactenberger calls the One Ring of Power. This transfer of power is happening on both small scales and large scales. On a large scale, this dynamic is why Bill Gates is now the largest owner of US farmland. He has used his wealth to convert one ephemeral store of value - technological dominance - into a more durable store of value - land that can be used to grow food. Because of money's mercurial and chimeric nature, it allows these transfers of power, small and large, to happen on a daily basis almost invisibly, and with the illusion that it is all voluntary, done through a willing buyer and a willing seller. But the rules of the game are rigged, and those who are trapped in scarcity and financial precarity (arguably most of the human inhabitants on this planet), are often forced to make unfavourable trades in order to obtain goods and services necessary for their survival. What's more egregious is that money allows its wielders to transfer power from one domain of life to another. Jeremy Waldron, a social philosopher, came up with the useful concept of "spheres of justice". He reasoned that we have a moral intuition that life is divided into various spheres of activity, and that there should be limits on how power in one sphere gets transferred to another. For example, just because someone is the world's greatest weightlifter shouldn't qualify him to be the judge of an art competition. But money is like the corrosive acid of the aliens in the Aliens movies, eating through every metal deck on a starship. The world's billionaires are able to use money to buy power and influence in almost any sphere of life. They can buy newspapers, social media outlets, the favour of judges, even entire hospital wings for their personal use. They may accumulate their wealth in one domain of life, and then use it to accumulate power in another domain. Money is the cover they use to do things that we would normally shun as unacceptable in any fair society. But it is not just the world's billionaires who do this, even though they are the most striking examples. We are all complicit in this system. Even when we are just buying a Big Mac, we are partaking in a system that is morally questionable and exploitative. The use of money obscures the exploitation of the labour and the destruction of nature that was necessary for the Big Mac to arrive in our hands, ready for consumption. Even buying the most "ethically" labelled, Fair Trade coffee, might involve unfortunate impacts somewhere along its supply chain. We have "earned" our money by being useful in one specific domain, and somehow this justifies us in using it in a system that transgresses across all domains in destructive and dehumanising ways. Being able to sit with this dilemma, without running away from it, or hiding our heads in the sand, or numbing our distress through self-soothing behaviours, is the first step in being able to collective reckon with what money permits via its existence. --- Further research: [[The End of Finance]]