RAW on Money

"...an issue that agitated philosophers and theologians from Aristotole to the late Renaissance: how can money, an inanimate object, reproduce itself? Only animals can reproduce, right?

...Many, especially St Ambrose, analyzed the fraud closely and decided that it rests upon a monoploly over the coin or currency. Hence the Banks of Piety, which... lent without charging interest, thereby abolishing or diminishing usury.

By 1692, the Banks of Piety had ceased to exist... That year, William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England, boldly declared the miracle of miraculous multiplication in an advertisment to prospective share-holders, promising they would have "benefit of interest on all the moneys which the bank creates out of nothing." Ever since, we have lived in what La tour de Pin called the "Age of Usury." Others, more politely, call it Finance Capitalism.

All of us, born into debt, remain in debt all our loves and the debt will pass on to our posterity, multiplying not only miraculously but faster than bunny rabbits. Economists call it compound interest.

Money not only has learned the art of fucking, but even that of reproduction. The people who demonstrate agains the World Bank and the IMF have not invented an original and radical idea but merely rediscovered the view of most of the Western classics."

- The Thing That Ate the Constitution, by Robert Anton Wilson

"A brief aside, a lot of political libertarians point the US abandoning the gold standard and turning to "fiat money" as the first sign of financial mistep, resulting in whatever the current economic crisis might be. And that's true, as far as that goes. But they don't seem to follow through the thought process and see that the valuation of gold, in and of itself, is a process of imaginary values and guesses." Rob Pugh - Shamelessly copied from the awesome Relaxed Focus blog