What you describe is not limited to money. But rather applies to everything.

If you owned 80 homes, how much is owning an additional house no different than the others worth to you?

If you had 500 pounds of chocolate sitting in your garage, how much is a plain Hershey bar worth to you?

Marginal utility - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

well, but if everyone would have enough money... or no one at all... the world could be perhaps a way better place - because there would be no class differences at least in that style anymore

Indeed, but money is different in the sense that it's not really a tangible product like house or chocolate, but rather a promise of value so to speak. There's a limit to how many houses you can build, but the amount of money that can be created is essentially infinite, because most of it is only in electronic form these days.

I think aurora said it better:

As in you can't give people something tangible you don't have, but you can always give people money, because it's essentially just a loan of sorts, that those people are going to have pay you back, usually with interest.

Much like tangible goods, you can't give people money if you don't have it yourself. And while the amount of money that can be created is essentially infinite, the amount of money that actually exists at any time is not. The point remains though, since the amount of money that exists is not infinite, there is scarcity and that scarcity is a large part of what gives pretty much anything it's value. If the amount of money that DID exist was near infinite, then it wouldn't have any value unless it was VERY tightly controlled.

Kind of like what is done with diamonds.


I'm sure this wasn't the idea when it was made, but IMO, one imaginary device that would absolutely destroy society world wide is the star trek replicator. Something that could eliminate the scarcity of all tangible goods permanently? We (meaning humanity) wouldn't know what to do with ourselves.

You can, actually. This is rather the point of the whole mess.

Well, you can in the sense that you can borrow it and repay it later. I'm talking in terms of I can't simply conjure it. Last night a homeless man asked me for 50 cents at a fast food restaurant.

I had used all of the money I had with me to purchase my dinner and was on my way home. Theoretically I could go to a bank and borrow money to give to him, but I can't simply create it right there on the street and give it to him.

But even if I were to borrow it, it's not like it's just coming out of the aether. I'm borrowing it from someone or some sort of organization.

You can, to stretch the metaphor, give him a legally binding contract saying that you'll pay him 50 cents at some point later.

Of course, in the banks case, the homeless man then sells that contract onto somebody else for 40 cents, and he sells it on for slightly less...

Which causes all sorts of things to crash down when, in reality, you don't have any money.

I may have signed an agreement, but I haven't actually given him the money, have I? If you're going to stretch the metaphor that way, then it still applies to tangible goods too. I can give him a legally binding contract saying that I'll give him something.

How do you measure the amount of existing money when it doesn't even exist? For ages now, the amount of money that exists has not been in any relation to the amount of goods and services it is worth so to speak. Money has value only because we all religiously believe it has value, but in reality it's just a piece of paper that's about as valuable as toilet paper.

We wouldn't know what do do if things were actually good?

Money only has value because we all currently agree that it has, and if tomorrow we stop using money as a vehicle of exchange, then all that money would be simply worthless. If today I give you a million dollars, and tomorrow it's all worthless, then I'm under no obligation to provide you anything. I simply gave you nothing, because that's all that money essentially is, just words and promises.

As it stands, money is a rather bad method of exchange as its value isn't constant, but it's something entirely arbitrary that isn't tied to any tangible factor.

99.99% of everyone would be out of a job, for one thing.

if i go eat at hooters would i be supporting the 1%?

But if you already had access to everything you can get these days with money, why would you need a job? Assuming we are going with the Star Trek canon where all basic material needs can be produced via replicators, and having a job/education is more of a pursuit of knowledge than mandatory routine for survival.

But that's true of lots of things. What good is gold? The only practical purpose I've ever seen for gold other than jewelry (which only has value because we believe it has value) are as the metal covering for the jacks at the end of headphones. Because it's so soft compared to every other metal, it's terrible as a building material. And yet we (humans) covet it just like we covet money. In fact, the money used to be backed by the gold and many believe it still should be. What value is gold besides subjective appearance?

Diamonds have value in industry, but very simply put, you don't need to mine industrial diamonds, you can just make synthetics. With the exception of those industrial gemstones, diamonds despite being a tangible item really only have value because we as a society say it does.



To the point where nobody had to do anything? To the point where almost everyone's job would be superfluous? Yes, we wouldn't know what to do. It's possible we could go through an educational revolution but..... well.....

I can't find a video with it so I'll just write the quote

"Hell, if I wanted schoolin', I'da gone to school" - Jayne Cobb.

To stop being bored.

That's it - there's no obligation to work, and indeed, some people seem to live doing very little, while others run businesses, but more as a service then for profit. Of course, it still needs people to actually contribute by doing work, but this is on the basis of an individual "I should help out" decision and not a "I need to work or I'll starve" decision.

Gold has a lot of value in advanced chemistry and physics - there are many very useful gold compounds. Most electronics will contain a small but not insignificant quantity of gold, as it's one of the best electrical and heat conductors available. If gold was not valued aesthetically, it would still be in demand, but would merely be cheaper. Silver has less use than gold (but still very far from no use), while platinum has a very large number of uses, for example, catalytic converters contain enough platinum that is is profitable to recycle them from scrapped cars. Diamonds are actually a far better example for your example than gold - while they are rare, they are not as rare as many people would believe, and subject to artificial price inflation by the cartels that control the vast majority of supply.

Is your old hardware made of gold, or just DIRT? is an interesting read on the use of rare elements.

Interesting article on the Occupy suppression by an author I respect: The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy | Naomi Wolf | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

No matter how much you speak the truth, those in power will just ignore you, label you insane and paranoid or in worst case, subdue you with force.

For those of you who think that you actually understand money and the scale of it all.

Hint:Right-Click, Save Link As...

what is the current status of the OWS movement? are they still a viable movement now that the 2012 election and general politics has settled down? jw

There's still a few dicks who think they matter.

But most of all, no one cares anymore.