People stopping believing in religion doesn't affect much. People stopping believing in money would collapse countries/the world. That alone will keep people believing in it. At the end of the day I can really take money and get real food with it, no matter how fake you claim it is.

Fundamentally money is just fancy IOUs. You trade bread for eggs. One day the neighbour broke all their eggs so they give you an IOU. You don't really need more eggs at that time so you give another person the egg token for some milk. He can then go get eggs.

That's all money is. Transferable, universal IOUs. And if you think about it, there doesn't need to be a limit to the amount of IOUs in existence. Yes, it's all built on trust and promises, that the egg farmer will honour the token and give you the eggs, but the IOU is just a concept, nothing needs to physically exist for the IOU to be valuable beyond the idea it will be followed through on.

So to me, it doesn't matter if money is "imaginary", because that's kind of the point. The only reason we ever had something backing it was to ensure the person could actually follow through with the IOU they gave out. Because if the chicken farmer gives IOUs out en masse so that they can get a bunch of stuff from their neighbours immediately, they're gonna have a problem if everyone comes to claim them at once.

But if you're happy to accept the idea he can eventually make good on it in some way, and the people of the village all agree to it, there's no reason he can't do this and give out the eggs over time. The fact it's built on trust doesn't automatically make it not real.

That said, there's definitely valid concern about how speculative bubbles and extreme wealth concentration can distort the system. But that's a problem with how the IOUs are distributed and manipulated, not with the idea of money itself.

And honestly when we look at the scale of the world today, what's the alternative? You want to go back to trading? How is that going to work for obtaining a TV, smartphone, internet? A variety of foods? Etc etc etc. I'm interested what alternatives could exist for a global or even national market.

[–] appetizer@lemmy.today 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Your idea works great as described. The system has grown beyond that though. Capitalists receive these IOUs because they own a portion of a company that owns a thing that neither the company nor the capitalist has ever had anything to do with. They receive these IOUs in perpetuty, but they never provided any contribution to the creation of anything.

Then you stack this a billion times, with IOUs servicing IOUs, amplifying the amount of IOUs, and skimming IOUs at every point from people who actually do the work, just to increase the number of IOUs held by a handful of people, until those people who contribute nothing, now hold the majority of the worlds IOUs.

This is fucked.

[–] Robust_Mirror@aussie.zone 1 points 3 hours ago

I agree and said as much when I touched on this. Again, this isn't a fundamental issue with money, it's an issue with the way it's allowed to be used, distributed and manipulated.

Money isn't broken, our world and laws regarding it are.