i believe that money is nothing more or less than a system by which to regulate inherent human greed.
a hypothetical situation to illlustrate the idea: money does not exist.
we all live in a communal society. if you were to take any three average homes today and pile all the worldly goods of those homes up, the pile would be enormous. everyone would take according to their need, and everyone would replace whatever they took when they were finished. but it would be so easy to take something from the pile, as a posession. the others, upon finding out about this, 99 times in 100 would then take things for their own to “balance out society” instead of having you put it back and restoring equality. but at this point we begin to assign value to certain things, those things that have been removed from the pile. we look at what our neighbors have and claim it’s better than what we took, so we take more and they do the same. we may even occasionally take their things to try to make ourselves as good as them. we feel a sense of sacrifice because we believe ourselves to have less than they do.
money is a standard value for all commodities, so that it can be measured how good we are compared to someone else. it’s more easily kept track of, and so those people who are self-conscious or believe they will get caught will not take more than they earn. it keeps people in line.
capitalism is an economic system in which people are shown only the people with great amounts of money so that they have a drive to make as much as possible. capitalism, instead of drowning that sense of greed, plays off of it, in order to have everyone of equal talent eventually hit a certain plateau and level off. it separates people out by classes and the ones at the top give those at the bottom something to strive for, but at the same time it keeps them at the bottom by not allowing them to make more. unfortunately, those who see the inherent evil in capitalism are kept from acting upon it by either saying to themselves, “well i can’t complain, because i’m better than that guy,” or “my complaining won’t change anything.”
this is kind of random but i’m not really good with words so i can’t say exactly what i want to say. i think i got the basic idea down though.