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What I'm getting at is in closed societies, power and money are different things. In open societies, money is power. Parent says government control over money i
by yingw787 7y ago
What I'm getting at is in closed societies, power and money are different things. In open societies, money is power. Parent says government control over money incentivizes authoritarianism. I'm arguing authoritarians have no need to control money to exercise power, because they have multiple ways to do the latter. For instance, during the Cold War the Soviet ruble was not convertible to U.S. dollars or British pounds, because the Soviet government didn't exercise power through open trade/commerce/finance, but rather through organizations like COMECON (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comecon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comecon). Money's power is observable, decentralized, and fine-grained, everything an economic pact is not.
- profalseidol 7y agoI'd like to add. I think the 'open society' mentioned is simply not an opposite to 'closed society'. Imo, there is a big spectrum to how closed or open a society is. How open a society is, are efforts mostly paid in blood by the plebians. Those who look down on others and want control are the ones who probably makes society more 'closed'. Money is only a tool. A way to facilitate immoral exchange of earth's finite resources + human labour. My leftist ideals would say, we shouldn't deny a fellow human access to food or a vacation just because he doesn't have anything in exchanges. Especially today that we have a problem of overbundance, and we are not even optimizing our production, but for profit. The Anthropologist David Greaber in his book, we can observe this human compassion when in the park when some stranger kid is in danger, maybe drowning, we do not hesitate for a sec to help out, and we don't ask for anything in return.