Hi Everyone:
Worth repeating.
> ROGER :
> What is money in the context of the MOQ?
>
> Money is a fungible system of exchanging social or biological patterns of
> VALUE. By itself, it is valueless. But as an agreed relative method of
> converting patterns of value, it is extremely benficial.
>
> As an example, at one time, the farmer could exchange a nights sleep in his
> barn to a traveler in exchange of two hours of the transient's effort
> chopping wood. Via the exchange, each willingly maximizes value and improves
> Quality. By adding money to the transaction, the two parties have expanded
> their freedom to definre the transaction. The itinerant can chop the wood
> and use the money to buy silk stockings, a new pair of gloves, crack cocaine,
> a ROTH IRA for his retirement, or to rent the farmer's barn. The farmer can
> likewise rent his barn out for money and a limitless cornacopia of choices.
> Money doesn't represent any THING of value , it represents VALUE. It doesn't
> represent limitations of social value, it represents dynamic freedom of
> choice.
>
> Money is a social lubricant to facilitate maximum social value freedom.
>
> Money is the measure of economic social freedom.
>
> At its best, it can buy food, shelter, sex, entertainment, security, and
> future potential. It can help the starving, it can help educate the
> uneducated, it can buy research for cures to disease, it can send man to the
> moon and it can even allow you to buy a copy of Lila and a sail boat for your
> journey to the South Wind of inner peace.
>
> At its worst, it extracts slavery, it can buy death and destruction and
> pollution and other lower values. It, along with Influence and Celebrity, is
> one of the three great measures of social value. It takes the value patterns
> of the pre-intellectual bonobo chimps (our closest relatives) and powers them
> into the 21st Century. It enables the Alpha Male to be Donald Trump.
>
> I could go on for hours about good and bad uses for money, but I always come
> back to the fact that it isn't money that is good or bad, it is the increase
> in freedom and possibility which leads to more good and bad. Money is a very
> high quality increase in Social Freedom. It has undoubtedly improved the
> lives of much of mankind, has facilitated the advancement of the industrial
> revolution, the information age, democracy and science. And led to all the
> troubles that accompany each of them.
>
> To the social level, money is dynamic freedom toward quality.
>
> Roger
>
> PS -- Jon, you speak much of people wasting their lives and doing little to
> improve their species. They are, of course, choosing to live their lives and
> and improve their species EXACTLY how they want to. Freedom is so
> precious....no?
Well said, Roger, well said.
Platt
MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html
MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:16 BST