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Originally Posted by RanaldoNecro

I am going to say that your understanding of barter systems is thorough.

But now we are in the supra-era of monetization. Huge lines of credit no longer represent the necessary human people investment. By that I mean we now pull money out of thin air. At one time, there was a gold standard to back that up but now it is different. This is why I think we have lost our way especially with the financial meltdown of 2008. I still to this day don't think that absolute monetization is really the answer.

I see kids dropping out of school because they have to work. I understand that but it doesn't work in the long run because they ignorant adults.

If you look at environmental damage (a 1000 year scar on the earth) it is in an indirect result of capital flow.

ah, yes. "pulling money out of thin air" is what i'm trying to understand and what got me reading economics. it appears suspect at first glance but when you look at it, the gold standard was also arbitrary-- gold is only worth what people agree is worth. but anyway the intricacies of macroeconomics and the money supply are beyond my knowlege at the moment. jico or whatever he calls himself these days can probably discuss this.

the environment: humans have always fucked it. we are responsible for the extinction of the woolly mammoth during the hunter-gatherer era. that and a ton more species.

what capitalism facilitates, it seems to me, is the speed of economic activity. by improving economic communication via the market. a lot of transactions can happen in an instant that in the past would take months or years perhaps to be completed. and by improving communication it allows faster economic activity. so yeah it can be spooky, the pace, but we've always done this shit, it's the machines that are new (but primitive machines predated money by the way).

i'm not saying that everything should be monetized, by the way, but it does happen. there are things i would not buy or sell; other people don't mind selling/buying everything-- kim kardashian sells her snatch on the internet, for example. in a different era she would have collected differently but she would have collected anyway-- there have always been kim kardashians, and suckers willing to pay by invading countries or exploiting peasants or giving up their herds or what not.