Models for Money in Western Economies

Peter Lock

Two fundamentally different models for money as purchasing power are:

1. In the model of money as a bartering device, the money exists as a stable extrinsic measure of worth for a community as a whole to use. In any measuring operation, the standard used must be extrinsic in its functioning to the assigned operation. It would be considered absurd if an engineer’s ruler were made of a type of concertina material which contracted or expanded according to the whim of its user.
2. In the model of money as a commodity which can be bought or sold in themarketplace, the money exists as an unstable intrinsic measure of the purchasing power of money itself. As such, its functioning can be abused by individuals in their exploitation of the whole global community for their own personal aggrandizement and exercise of usurped power.If money is to serve as the efficient means of exchange and distribution of all commodities in the marketplace, it is essential that money itself be not an element of the set of all commodities that money can buy. As a means to an end, money must not be allowed to become a real end in itself. As a stand-in value-token or intermediary bartering ticket, its sole reason for existence lies in its essential otherness as a measure of relative wealth-worth. Its own worth must remain independent of and aloof from the transactions and reactions it catalyses in the chemistry of commerce.The definition of a commodity needs to be modified if it is to be consistent and to avoid all circular logic. An economic commodity is any type of marketable goods or services which has an intrinsic value in itself and whose value can be relatively assessed using an extrinsic suitable stable non-commodity money standard and hence bought and sold. In other words, an economic commodity is any marketable entity, other than money, which money itself can buy.

   There is nothing in Nature which corresponds to the consensus notion of interest-burdened debt. Debt money only exists as a contrived fiction in the human mind. The western economies will either repudiate their slavery to privatized debt-money or they will drown in their own sea of despair.