Being able to pile up money is kind of this intrinsicily weird thing. In the development of money it begins as this token to account for surplus. You bring more

Being able to pile up money is kind of this intrinsicily weird thing. In the development of money it begins as this token to account for surplus. You bring more grain to the silo, you get more tokens. These tokens are exchangeable in the end for grain and that is that. In this way tOtherhe tokens represent a kind of debt. The silo owes you that amount of grain. People begin accepting the token in trade because they can exchange it for grain. It has become money But unlike our money, these tokens have some naturally occuring soft limits. There is only so much grain anyone will find value in at any given time. Therefore, the amount one could influence another individual with it had some limits. And the amouny of tokens one sloshed into "the market" quickly erroded their vakue. What this meant was, yes society owed you a debt of commodities but how much that debt waa transactable to different areas was limited and how much you could lean on it at any given time was limited as well. A well off plantation owner could work very hard, hit a lucky year and dump a ton of grain into the silo. The tokens he got from this would certainly buy him some influence. He could buy a lot of things certain goods would still be unavailable to him. He could pay a lot of bribes but a lot of people would only need so many grain tokens. This farmer contributed a value of surplua grain and the silo tokens can pay him back in many benefits but the further the dealings get from grain, the more limited his power. Ultimately the silo owes him a debt of grain. Our modern conceot of money obliterates those limits. A clerk at a desk earns the same tokens as a pastor or a soldier or a CEO. Those tokens are then convertible into anything no matter how disparate: food, housing, healthcare, etc. So instead of a commodity debt, owed by a silo, each worker earns a social debt. Effectively carried by all of us. Money is debt. This means that accomplishing something which leads to a high indebtedness in one area means society owes you a lot in all areas. Again, this seems normal to us but if we think about a distribution of goods that is proportional to the amount and kinds of work people do, it doesn't make much sense. Or at least it seems quite strange and prone to manipulation.