No, greed is constant, and I don’t mention it above. I make no apologia for human nature, nor do I expect a utopia if currency suddenly disappeared. But if you get to the heart of it, your kids don’t fight over money - they fight over wealth - physical goods. In essence, a person has no need for money itself, only the goods it can buy.
After money detached from the gold standard and physical connection, it became effectively imaginary. As long as money is tied to the physical possession, it becomes difficult to hoard - a prime example is Fort Knox, which, while it hold a huge amount of physical gold that has a large monetary value, the vaults of Knox are dwarfed in comparison to the amount of money held by Elon Musk. In fact, I don’t think there’s enough physical gold in the world to cover Musk’s fortune.
Now, if Musk actually had to keep his wealth in the form of physical gold, he’d never be able to use it or leverage it the way he can with money. The logistics and expense of handling that amount of gold would be insurmountable. It’s very physical nature prevents the inflation and distortion we see with fiat currency. Another example would the millions in paper currrency Pablo Escobar lost to mold and rats - the need to hold the physical wealth effectively eroded it.
But money isn’t attached to gold anymore, or anything physical. It exists as an arbitrary point value within a bank account, and it’s attachment to physical goods only exists because we believe it does.
And in this arbitrary imaginary system, the value of a pile currency can now end up exceeding the total wealth of the world if the powers that be choose to let it.
Just like one man, Musk, is richer than all the rest of us according to this system, when his actual value as a member of society is about that of your average ketamine junkie.
No, greed is constant, and I don’t mention it above. I make no apologia for human nature, nor do I expect a utopia if currency suddenly disappeared. But if you get to the heart of it, your kids don’t fight over money - they fight over wealth - physical goods. In essence, a person has no need for money itself, only the goods it can buy.
After money detached from the gold standard and physical connection, it became effectively imaginary. As long as money is tied to the physical possession, it becomes difficult to hoard - a prime example is Fort Knox, which, while it hold a huge amount of physical gold that has a large monetary value, the vaults of Knox are dwarfed in comparison to the amount of money held by Elon Musk. In fact, I don’t think there’s enough physical gold in the world to cover Musk’s fortune.
Now, if Musk actually had to keep his wealth in the form of physical gold, he’d never be able to use it or leverage it the way he can with money. The logistics and expense of handling that amount of gold would be insurmountable. It’s very physical nature prevents the inflation and distortion we see with fiat currency. Another example would the millions in paper currrency Pablo Escobar lost to mold and rats - the need to hold the physical wealth effectively eroded it.
But money isn’t attached to gold anymore, or anything physical. It exists as an arbitrary point value within a bank account, and it’s attachment to physical goods only exists because we believe it does.
And in this arbitrary imaginary system, the value of a pile currency can now end up exceeding the total wealth of the world if the powers that be choose to let it.
Just like one man, Musk, is richer than all the rest of us according to this system, when his actual value as a member of society is about that of your average ketamine junkie.