silver and gold

One day at one of the my many many many prior jobs I said to one of my temporary co-workers, with a straight face, "look, if I feed green paper into this glowing box it gives me sweet drinks and silver disks." I was using the pop machine. She looked at as if I were crazy, even though I had said nothing strange or untruthful.

What money is is a language, and this person found my statements inexplicable because I, for a brief moment, stopped using the money language and started using ordinary language to pragmatically describe the money system. If I'd said =I'm going to buy a pop with this dollar and get some change= they wouldn't have seen anything strange in my statement, except perhaps that I was bothering to relate such a meaningless transaction to them

Situational logic rules most days here in modern society, and we tend to accept quite comfortably the assumption that it makes sense to carry a bunch of green paper around to exchange for goods and services. We think of money in those terms, in terms of its buying power, it's exchange value. This is not perhaps so wise, because it causes us to ignore the fact that, first off, we trade our valuable time and resources in for something with no intinsic value (you can just barely wipe your ass with it) at all. Gold, for example, has some intinsic value: it's malleable, stable, conductive, it has valuable chemical properties.

Anytime they want these bastards can yank the pins and drain all the value out of our stupid stacks of questionable currency. All the counts is the land and the means of production. In America we threw in the perfect propaganda tool for free. I'm not concerned about money in this way anymore: Naturally I keep a little around to keep you all appeased, but I don't have any attachment to it. There's nothing there to be attached to. Value isn't something you can hold in your hand.

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.