Of course, we can have varieties of money designs, each with different motives, implications and characteristics. Midas' gold is one such. Frequent flier miles, grocery coupons and cigarettes in prison are yet others, among hundreds.

Here, we are concerned with our most familiar, namely those dominant, debt-based fiat-generated trading currencies. "Debt-based" means money created within the lending process, (each dollar in circulation is matched, literally, by a dollar of debt); "fiat," means it has value because someone says so; "trading currency" means its greatest utility engages global trade.

Midas discovered the disconnection between market value and meeting needs. You can't eat, drink or hug gold. Or dollars.

Although dollars have their declared trading values, this may not be relevant to social infrastructure. Indeed, this kind of money has traditionally presumed markets and powerful self-regulation-qualities absent within the cultural interior, the worlds of social services, health care, retirement, child care, education, safety nets and the like. Accordingly, I humbly suggest the possibility that these dominant trading currencies may be quite literally incapable of doing the jobs we are now asking them to do.

"What else!?" You ask with justified alarm.

"Not sure." I reply with trepidation. I can only observe that each day's headlines seem to bring news of more cracks within the financial foundations of our social infrastructure. These reinforce my abiding fear that our answers for these may not lie in dollars.

We laughed at the Soviet Union. Silly Russians. They believed they could distribute society's goods and services based on people's needs, that folks would give according to their capacities. Oops. Didn't work.

And so we determined to turn everything into dollars. And we did. Then we touched the educational systems and based them on dollars. Then we touched law enforcement and the legal systems. More dollars. Then we subordinated family structures to employment demands. More dollars. Then we touched medicine and health care, welfare and compassion systems of all sorts, retirement systems, housing, transportation systems, land use planning, natural resources across the board, equality levelers of all types, the arts, fashion, entertainment, sports, food and food distribution and-...I could go on...-in short, most aspects of modern life. More dollars.

Was our money ever meant for this? Perhaps we intuit the implications of this cultural arbitrage.

Like: How can we compare the life of a newborn child to a shopping mall?

Like: How can we stack more days, hours, minutes, seconds of apparent life for those dying, against inoculation programs?