Money is not motivation...

What do you think we have at the moment? #-o

Poor corporate slave: I’m a slave to the system. The Man keeps waving his dollar bills in my face with the promise that I can have it if only I toil and sweat for him, like a carrot dangling from a stick and I’m the horse.

The Man: I’m a slave to the system. The “poor” corporate slave keeps waving his talents and skills in my face with the promise that I can use them to make money if only I hand out my hard earned cash out of my own pocket, like a carrot dangling from a stick and I’m the horse.

:smiley:

The (private, non-corporate) Entrepreneur Who Actually Thinks With His Brain: If I offer this guy money and the resources with which he can profitably use his skills, which he otherwise wouldn’t have had, and I also take the burden of monetary risk from him, and in exchange for giving him this opportunity and taking all the monetary risk from the venture, I ask from him some of the profits, we can both benefit from the interaction.

The Employee Who Actually Thinks With His Brain: My boss is offering me a deal, and I can choose to accept it or reject it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone offering me a deal, even if the deal is a bad one. If I find it a bad deal, I can reject the offer. I am no slave to this person, I have analyzed my options and have found that the deal he’s offering me is one that is the most profitable for me given all my options, so I accept.

The Corporate Bank Owner: I can risk other peoples’ money haphazardly in order to make tons of my own money, and if my risks pay off, I’ll be rich! – if they don’t pay off, the government will bail me out, and I’ll be rich! Thank you government for providing me with this opportunity! What would us rich people do without “government regulations”?

While that is whats occurring, it is not a property of money that it is enslaving.
Our system is enslaving, not the money.

Excellent analysis, FJ.

Many things motivate me - certainly not just money. But I have a job to make money. Making money is my primary motivation for having a job. I guess the only way to test whether I’m telling the truth or not is if I win the lottery (though I never play)…

It’s a bit more complex than that and you know it apart from your pointless smug diatribe.

The system controls the money supply as it is one of it’s main instrumental tools of functioning.

You have to obtain money and tons of it to do anything within the system of society. That is how money is used to enslave and control people especially when it reduces all life to being an abstract of accesses and restrictions.

Human beings are not naturally inclined to work for others which is why currency was devised as a means of controlling the daily behaviors or activities of people by that of coercive motivation within it’s abstract rewards and punishments.

In what way is it more complex?

You really have to ask?

Obviously, it’s far more complex - in many ways - which way are you thinking of?

Humans naturally engage in economic activity. The most ‘natural’ is bartering; many monkeys and apes (including humans) have instinctive intuitions about what constitutes a ‘fair’ trade, though to my knowledge only humans engage in spontaneous exchanges of goods. As someone has already said, money is just an abstraction of bartering, allowing the value of exchanges to be saved up or divided, and allowing people to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges even if they couldn’t make a direct exchange of goods.

It’s actually possible to re-appropriate monkeys’ economic instincts to get them to use a abstracted means of exchange:

For Hegel, the unhappy consciousness is divided against itself, separated from its ‘essence’, which it has placed in a ‘beyond’. Marx used essentially the same notion to portray the situation of modern individuals—especially modern wage labourers—who are deprived of a fulfilling mode of life because their life-activity as socially productive agents is devoid of any sense of communal action or satisfaction and gives them no ownership over their own lives or their products. In modern society, individuals are alienated in so far as their common human essence, the actual co-operative activity which naturally unites them, is power-less in their lives, which are subject to an inhuman power—created by them, but separating and dominating them instead of being subject to their united will. This is the power of the market, which is ‘free’ only in the sense that it is beyond the control of its human creators, enslaving them by separating them from one another, from their activity, and from its products.

Columbine High School? Oklahoma City? Virginia Tech? Thats only the beginning.

You will get alot more: “I woke up one morning, and I didn’t like where I was” scenarios, as the human psyche continues to break down even further.

Merry Xmas

Somebody did not get what they wanted for Christmas where instead they decided to take it out on others by depriving them of life itself. :-k

Increased public killings having a correlation with that of stagnation and individual repression within society?

Nah, that cannot be! I read the news earlier today where it told me that everything was all well in the world where all I need to do is keep shopping, working, and take the occasional sedative in order that I blissfully keep paying my taxes for the greater management of government.

That sort of talking is distracting me from my blissful daily programming and indoctrination where I am completely unaware of the world around me as I graze in the local suburban pasture. Bah!

In the next 11 years look foreword to violent group insurrections starting everywhere. My, this is so much fun!

What is economic activity?

Explain.

As far as I know human beings are the only species that enslave one another.

Fiat money is no longer worth it’s own value of exchange in bartering where anymore it’s used as a symbolic instrument of power in a service based economy. It serves only as a behavioral controlling mechanism.

Laborers do not even receive their equal value of wealth back in return for their services rendered in creating products, goods, or commodities.

This is how money or currency has left its traditional origin of bartering.

:laughing:

This is empirically dubious. For all that people can be divided by class and wealth, increasing exchanges tends to increase peace and mutual prosperity. Countries that trade do not fight each other, and people who trade generally have good relationships. The reason is that the exchanges are mutually beneficial: both parties trade a good they value less for a good they value more. Neither wants to jeopardize the relationship.

You blame money for the predicament of those unsatisfied with their lives, but few take the risks necessary to find a better paying job, or to gain the skills necessary to make themselves more valuable in the market, and more proximately few make the sacrifices necessary to accumulate a savings that would buffer them against the risks of a transition. Other loci of blame are the cartels that fix pricing on services, that prohibit trade, that over-regulate markets to the detriment of the fluidity and freedom that make the market work. The market economy has clearly created a lot of good, why condemn the whole system over the imperfect margins?

Humans have innate economic intuitions, meaning that they appraise the fairness of exchanges without being taught to do so, or even told to do so in a given instance. This is true of many if not all apes and monkeys. Humans also spontaneously engage in exchanges, trading one thing of value for another. By “spontaneously,” I mean without being forced to or instructed to or how. Children begin trading e.g. food items from a young age. This is a direct rebuttal to the claim that “[h]uman beings are not naturally inclined to work for others”: “work[ing] for others” is just an exchange of values, with one party offering goods (or their abstraction) in exchange for the time, energy, or skill of another. There is nothing particularly “unnatural” about this exchange, and it is founded on instinctive economic mechanisms.

I don’t think that’s true. Ants and bees are slaves to their queens. If you discount this form of slavery, I think it would be because you include in slavery certain mental characteristics that will exclude any non human animals not by virtue of their conduct, but by virtue of their limited cognition.

Equal value as defined by who? If no one is willing to give a person more than x for a certain good (where x is a quantity of goods or an abstraction of their value), in what sense can it be said that the value of the good is greater than x? The value of a good is not an objective quality of it; it’s defined economically relative to other goods by a collection of exchanges.

There are times when that mechanism breaks down, and in particular a monopsony will undervalue a good, in that the single buyer would be willing to pay more for the good, but does not have to because she knows that sellers are choosing between underselling and not selling at all. Even still, the prices must be higher than the value of the goods to the seller, or else he will just choose to keep the goods rather than exchanging them.

In any case, the existence of market failures is well known, and relatively rigorously defined. The seeming allegation in the latter half of this thread that the market always fails is untenable, at least on the scant rhetorical evidence offered in support of it.

Elaborate?

Trade only benefits both parties when it brings practical prosperity. When another has so much more to gain by exterminating the other party, they will instead do so. Especially when you are talking about governments. It’s all a silly power play for land, resources and especially currency.

Money is only a byproduct of your system. I don’t want to work within your system. I want to destroy your system like I would destroy a bad dream. By waking up from it. The market is a byproduct of a long gone era, one of which silly puppets are still deluded into thinking exists.

You’re a Crybaby.