Is money private property?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

You can use it to increase your standard of living, but then you don't own it.

Not entirely true. A lot of people improve their standard of living without giving up ownership of their money. Sometimes by taking a risk that they will, in fact, give up ownership (gambling/stock market). Sometimes with the threat of what they could do with that money (a company that threatens smaller competitors with lawsuits even when they have no legal case because they know they can win through attrition).

Eventually, you have to spend money.  I'm not talking about the generation of additional funds.

[Telarus]

Chaoflux had this to say on Facebook:

Money is a certificate of debt, as defined by the Federal Reserve, and upheld by bonds ponied up by the government. You can't own it, you can only be someone who controls it or is controlled by it. The Man doesn't take your money away from you, he increases your debt.

Currently, the actors in the economy who have any impact/control over the flow of money are the organizations (government, IMF, financial sectors, etc) who farm and control debt.

Yup. Your credit cards, phone bills, car payments, property mortgages, etc are all filtered down into a Farmville-like risk game for some bureaucrat-addict somewhere (who probably bribed Hillary Clinton a few million for the privilege to trade your debt on the international market).

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Of course, all my arguments are predicated on the idea of a fiat currency.  A currency where something like gold is used as the base unit of currency would follow different rules, naturally, because it is a) a limited resource, and b) has utility aside from acting as a form of currency.

Yes, that's what I'm basing my question on, too... money as it is currently used in capitalist society.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Chaoflux had this to say on Facebook:

Money is a certificate of debt, as defined by the Federal Reserve, and upheld by bonds ponied up by the government. You can't own it, you can only be someone who controls it or is controlled by it. The Man doesn't take your money away from you, he increases your debt.

Currently, the actors in the economy who have any impact/control over the flow of money are the organizations (government, IMF, financial sectors, etc) who farm and control debt.

Yup. Your credit cards, phone bills, car payments, property mortgages, etc are all filtered down into a Farmville-like risk game for some bureaucrat-addict somewhere (who probably bribed Hillary Clinton a few million for the privilege to trade your debt on the international market).

I like his take on it; it's interesting.

[East Coast Hustle]

can you elucidate?

Money is just one way in which we represent wealth. While the wealth that the money represents may be (mostly) your own, the physical money itself is not. If it was, you'd be able to do any damn thing you want with it without fear of prosecution.

After all, there's no law on the books that says you can't cut your car in half, or drill a hole in your laptop.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You can make almost anything you own unusable in any way you see fit. You have to keep money in reusable condition, though, which seems to imply that it is not so much private property as a tool used by the public to facilitate private exchanges. At a certain point it even ceases to be a physical tool and becomes a virtual tool. In addition, taxation implies that money is not private property, because when it changes hands, the government (the public) automatically owns part of it.

It's pretty weird stuff.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Damn, the Facebook thread seems to have stalled out at 56 posts. http://www.facebook.com/kalera/posts/10150517468114069?ref=notif&notif_t=feed_comment

I was really expecting better from the FB people. Hardly anyone there has even tried pulling apart the question of why it might not be private property.

[kingyak]

You can use it to increase your standard of living, but then you don't own it.

Not entirely true. A lot of people improve their standard of living without giving up ownership of their money. Sometimes by taking a risk that they will, in fact, give up ownership (gambling/stock market). Sometimes with the threat of what they could do with that money (a company that threatens smaller competitors with lawsuits even when they have no legal case because they know they can win through attrition).

Eventually, you have to spend money.  I'm not talking about the generation of additional funds.

I think I read "standard of living" as a bit broader than you intended it. Purely in terms of creature comforts, you're right, but I think there are some intangibles (power, status, sense of security, misappropriated self-esteem) that come with having a lot of money even if it isn't spent (or, probably more often, at a lower cost than someone without huge piles of cash).

[BadBeast]

Money in itself is not wealth. It's a promisary note, sanctioning a third party access to wealth, on your behalf. Thing is Money promises access to wealth that hasn't actually been generated yet. And the handlers charge you a fee for generating the wealth that they've promised you access to. Think of one $10 bill. In any one day, it can generate many times it's face value. It can be used as a contract for dozens of transactions in a day, but this isn't reflected in it's face value.

Although it may have generated perhaps 1000% of it's face value to the economy, it still only allows you personally to access $10 worth of this wealth. So somewhere along the line, someone is getting $990 per day, on the strength of this one $10 bill. That you may have used to spend $4 worth of wealth. That is lent to you at interest. By Pirates.

ETA; SO no, it is not private property. (Well, it is, it's just not your property)

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am close to viewing money as a resource rather than as property. It's a pretty tricky topic.

[Cain]

Of course, all my arguments are predicated on the idea of a fiat currency.  A currency where something like gold is used as the base unit of currency would follow different rules, naturally, because it is a) a limited resource, and b) has utility aside from acting as a form of currency.

Yes, that's what I'm basing my question on, too... money as it is currently used in capitalist society.

I suspected a few people would bring it up, so I thought it best to forestall it by being completely open about the premises I am operating under.

[Triple Zero]

how did the discussion in your class go, Nigel?

My teacher said that money is too complicated and shut it down.

Hey that's the same thing your government almost did in September

On topic, isn't this whole idea about whether money itself is useful, or even "property", if you're not spending it, closely related to the economic term liquidity ?

Like, to paraphrase the saying: You can't have your money and buy cake with it too?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Of course, all my arguments are predicated on the idea of a fiat currency.  A currency where something like gold is used as the base unit of currency would follow different rules, naturally, because it is a) a limited resource, and b) has utility aside from acting as a form of currency.

Yes, that's what I'm basing my question on, too... money as it is currently used in capitalist society.

I suspected a few people would bring it up, so I thought it best to forestall it by being completely open about the premises I am operating under.

Perfect... probably wise to get that definition in early in the conversation.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

how did the discussion in your class go, Nigel?

My teacher said that money is too complicated and shut it down.

Hey that's the same thing your government almost did in September

On topic, isn't this whole idea about whether money itself is useful, or even "property", if you're not spending it, closely related to the economic term liquidity ?

Like, to paraphrase the saying: You can't have your money and buy cake with it too?

OOOH SNAP

And yes, it is related; I need to think about it more.

Today in class, money-as-public-resource was brought up by one of the other students. I'll copypaste my reply to Net vaguely regarding it in my FB thread:

Well, for one thing, if money is not private property but a public resource, it puts a very different spin on taxation. It really might even change the way people view extreme concentrations of wealth. We live in a capitalist democracy, and the monopolistic capitalism we practice here is really damaging our democracy. In democracies that utilize a form of socialistic capitalism, they tend to have much more democratic systems, and an economically healthier public, even though they also practice a high level of wealth redistribution via taxation and public services.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Aside from government and banking institutes (who are essentially just gaming the system for profit) I don't think money is property, aside from valueless little chunks of paper with some pictures and shit printed on them. Those bit of paper are merely tokens, the "real" money is the power to acquire property that those tokens represent. Nowadays, with electronic money replacing physical currency tokens more and more this distinction is even easier to see.

The real purpose of money is to facilitate exchange of goods and/or services, ie. the exchange and aquisition of property. Therfore money is not property in and of itself merely a metric by which property changes hands. There is, however, a tendency to believe in money as a thing, in and of itself, rather than a score or level and this leads to much strangeness and misery.