http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/dollar_paranoia.html It occurred to me that a single dollar can, by the mere act of changing hands, generate hundreds of tax dollars over the course of its useful life. Let's say you live in New York, and you earn a dollar; you buy a shirt with that dollar, and suddenly 8 cents is owed to the government; the vendor uses that same dollar to buy a candy bar, and once more money from taxes flows to the government. Take a more concrete example -- you have $10 worth of cabbage, and someone gives you $10 for it. There is still only $10 worth of cabbage around, but all of a sudden you need $.80 above and beyond that to give to the government. In fact, once that $10 worth of cabbage changes hands 13 times in New York, you need $20 in circulation to cover it -- despite there still being only $10 worth of cabbage (and that, by this point, rather elderly).
But, I told myself, that money is assumed to be in circulation already; it's not as if taxes create money -- does it? I decided to do some looking around. It seems that taxes themselves do not create money -- that job, I found, is left to the Gross National Product, which is based on the value of goods and services purchased. So, if you and a friend keep paying each other the same fifteen dollars to provide some service for each other (say, you pay him $15 to shake your hand, then he pays you the same $15 to shake his), you'll eventually bump up the GNP and cause a concomitant increase in the money supply. What's more, this increase in the money supply has a tendency to increase spending. So, spending money increases the GNP (whether that spending was to build a museum, clean up an oil spill or tear down an old lady's ancestral home -- so long as the money moves, it doesn't matter why or whence), which increases the money supply, which causes further increases in spending... And let's not even get into inflation.
This is how money breeds -- it evolved in a socio-memetic niche, and is now breeding like fruit flies only wish they could. Sure, THEM can use it (even as it uses THEM, in an icky kind of co-parasitic venture), but money is no more a tool of THEM than bees are a tool of flowers.
It may seem that the credit industry is poised to deliver its own memeto-evolutionary version of a million-ton-meteor impact, but this will only serve to stem the tide of green paper before it comes flooding down Wall Street like a plague of rabbits over a New Zealand farm -- and green paper is only one sub-species of the ubiquitous Dollar. As Ol' Sam managed to point out, money lives primarily in our heads, and the credit industry certainly isn't taking any steps toward bringing money to extinction there -- indeed, the sub-species of Dollar which lives as an abstraction will experience a population explosion of untold proportions if the credit industry ever succeeds in completely unshackling it from the need for physical representation; the abstract dollar will have as great an evolutionary advantage over the paper dollar as the paper dollar did over the gold dollar. Dollars can multiply utterly unhindered in the abstract, without anyone needing to figure out where to put several billion tons of paper. And all the while, they will be sheltered by captains of industry and thrifty housewives alike; will grow fat on greed, commercialism and envy; will be transported to new environs by the spread of Western Culture -- until, eventually, they gain illimitable memetic dominion over the human mind.
Assuming, rather optimistically, that this hasn't happened already.
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