Wealth, and Other Mostly Imaginary Things

I'm going to start this post with a statement many may find incredible: Money is meaningless.

For quite some time now, I've been suspicious of financial institutions.  They make a ton of money by shuffling it around, packaging it in different ways, and watching numbers go up and down.  It seems, to an outside observer, like a shell game of sorts.  And in some ways, it is, but not in the way you would think.

You see, the value of currency is judged only by its perceived value.  Sound tautological?  Well, it is.  What is the value of a dollar, after all?  Arguably, it is its ability to be exchanged for a certain good or service, at a certain rate.  But what determines the exchange rate is the perceived value of what a dollar represents, vs the perceived value of the good or service.  To put it in other terms, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it" - Publilius Syrus.

Traditionally, currency was backed by something, that is, it could be traded in for a certain amount of gold or other materials considered valuable.  Not so anymore.  The US Dollar, among other currencies, is not actually backed by anything - the only thing you can do with a dollar is give it to someone else in exchange for something, so they can exchange it for something, and so on and so forth.  The entire US economy runs on the faith that the dollar is worth what the Federal Reserve says it's worth!  Who here honestly trusts the Fed?

/*Though, while we're on the subject, why has gold been considered valuable for so long?  It's shiny and hard to find.  That's really it.  Humans only very recently discovered it has actual uses in things like electronics.  (For the uninitiated, /* */ and // are commonly used in programming languages for denoting comments.  I find it a useful convention.)*/

Stocks are a common way to "grow" wealth.  But what are you really buying into when you buy stocks?  It is, in essence, a promise that you "own" a small part of a corporation, and will see some of the profits, at some point in time, if they feel like paying out dividends.  These stocks go up and down in monetary value based on what people think the payout will be; their opinions, of course, influenced by a wide range of factors.  Think about this for a second.  It's a unit of faith in a company, valued by a hypothetical payout in units of faith in the Fed.  And somehow people who make it big in the stock market are considered clever for buying into this scheme at the "right" time.  The stock market is a meta-fantasy of sorts, based entirely on perceptions and illusions!  Winners and losers are picked by what other people think of the things they chose!  Is this really what we want modern society to be based on?

Don't get me wrong, a certain amount of wealth is useful for buying essentials like food, water, shelter, and medical care, or the occasional extra thing you might want.  But to view money as an end in of itself is to merely chase after fantasy.

/*I did also want to get to power, and how much of that is also an illusion, but this post has gotten long enough as it is, IMO.  For next time, perhaps.*/