Like: Why should "we" pay athletes so much more than teachers? Etc.
How can we so casually monetize workers' health or children's hugs or care for the aging or the value of clean water or justice for those on the blunt end of discrimination or protecting our society from the ravages of drugs or making sure that cigarettes kill fewer and few and also re fat and also re alcohol and also re gangs and also re forest fires and hurricanes and hail and and and...?
Whew! It is a big job being dollars. Maybe too big. Though we usually view these issues in terms of justice, it might be instructive to view them in terms of pure function.
Seriously. What if we are asking dollars to do chores it just does not do very well? More to the point: What if we are asking this form of money, this water in which we swim, to do jobs it cannot do for the long haul? Just like gold did not have the capacity to keep Midas fed, warmed and loved, could it be that our collective failures to understand dollars have served to create a most sandy foundation for enormous social constructs?
Could it be that we have been monetizing the ineffable, then wondering why the ineffable doesn't act like a market? Maybe the ineffable, being inexpressible and all, can simply not be monetized with the dominant, debt-based, fiat currencies?
Do I hear the faint resonance of Midas' wistful sighs as he grasped the inevitable implications of his morning's work?
Here's our deal. Throughout human history, dominant money systems served the three functions described above. They have essentially served no other. The social systems did those. Custom. Culture. Religion. Tribes. Family. Neighborliness. Or simple acceptance of life's vagaries. People die. Stuff happens. But can we put it all on money's back? Frankly, I suggest we consider the likelihood that we cannot-any more than Midas could solve his problems with more gold.
I do not argue for heartlessness, hard-heartedness or anarchy. Nor do I suggest these are not real issues. Yet, we must also observe a simple fact: Never, in the history of humankind, have dominant trading currencies been asked to do the jobs we
are asking them to do in this 21st century.
Yet here we are demanding that the same money that serves to transact global business, money that changes both hands and valuations with spectacular volatility in inconceivable volumes, also serve as the public program foundation for feeding the hungry, healing the mentally and physically sick, generating justice, homing the homeless, clothing the naked, assisting the elderly, supporting the unproductive, parenting children or otherwise serving to buffer your folks and mine, (then us), from ill fortune's ravages and time's depredations. We can wish to be caring, compassionate and supportive; it just seems hard to do that within a medium of commercial exchange.