No, I didn't mean you needed to be constructive at all. I try not to insist that people do things they don't wish to do, but I do suggest that they do sometimes.
Central Banks control the supply of money and pick a value for it. Been going on for ages now, and the only thing that actually gives that money value is the willingness of people to use the exchange as a representation of value they'll accept.
Otherwise we'd just have to use gold & silver coins that were valued at the amount they actually weighed and the value of the metal itself. Or we could use gems. OTH, you can, and some people have and do, use cowrie-shells.
The problem, my dear, doesn't seem to be the institutions as much as it is who and what the institution determines it's most pressing need to back and bolster is. Central Banks have never been operating with the bedrock notion that they have to look out for the population, at least not all of it, just the class from whom the central bankers derive, or the class they've become a part of. They do that quite well in USA.
The reason Bernanke/Paulson and others cannot see that "the problem" as anything other than taking bad debt, or as Liz said yesterday "securities" off the hands of Morgan, Citi and BankAm is that like fish they cannot imagine breathing anything except the medium in which they live.
They, thus, back the "too big to fail" proposition because they know they are "too big to fail." And the credit crunch WILL worsen because the people who make the credit aren't going to release it until they get what they want: the removal of bad investments at no cost to them.
The government, any government, is going to tax as a way of making plain to itself and others (foreign and domestic) that it does in fact own the allegiance (liked or not, by fear, terror, or adoration) of the governed. The government is going to perceive that its individual members, servants, lackeys, what-have-you also need to have the medium of exchange without having to go do work at a different location for someone else's tokens.
Is it all a pose? Why yes, always has been. But as long as people continue to give the pose their belief and at some degree their trust that will not change and in point of fact if they do change they will make another government that operates on the same pose.
You anarchists don't want the pose, but people are simply not going to find it reasonable to live in no society at all. We've been social so freaking long that we feel most un-at-home when we aren't socialized. Which is why anarchists tend to be young and angry. That's not a bad thing, just a thing that over time seems to disappear, unless one is Prince Kropotkin. Of course, when you're a prince you can afford to "be" an anarchist, as you know full-well you don't actually have to live as one and reap whatever harvest comes from x-odd million people doing their own thing at your expense.
Nichole
