What is Money? [Part 2] A Social Institution? Unitized Trust? A memory? An Acknowledgement? Credit?

Chris Lindstrom of the Berkshares local complementary currency expands on his answer to the question "What is money?" asked by Aaron Wissner of Local Future during the 2009 American Monetary Institute's Monetary Reform Conference.

This is the second part of Chris Lindstrom's response to "What is money?" Please also see part one.

Chris Lindstrom: Um, because when I hear peoples definitions, um, you know, I think, okay, thats one aspect, it might be one dimension, but it feels incomplete, and I think that, you know, money is elusive, you know, money is one of the most elusive elements of our social institutions, that we have, I mean, theres nothing more mysterious, I think, in our, our society, as an element of our society than money, and its very, very hard to define, yet it seems to be somewhat essential, but the reason that I said unitized trust is because the act of exchange actually does not require money as we know it, but there is something about money that creates a certain definition, or texture, or memory of an exchange that seems to give depth to our experience, and that may be not totally necessary, I havent really figured that one out, I feel like theres a role that it plays that is significant, but I do have friends who believe in a gift economy, who believe that money fundamentally is a perversion of the gift, but I dont know if I totally agree with that, I think that money can actually be an expression of the gift, or an acknowledgement of the gift in its purest form, but I do feel like when you start stripping it down, I feel like money and gift are not opposing things, I think theyre actually complementarythat theres something, not complementary, but that they correspond to one another, and that money can actually be some kind of, in truth, in its most organic and healthy state, its kind of this acknowledgement of the gift, because really, when we give someone money, weve gotten everything so convoluted and so mixed up in our head, but, really when we give someone money, were not really giving them anything. I mean, what the hell is that money that were giving them? Its just a piece of paper, but whats embodied in that paper is a symbolic acknowledgement, or, its credit. I mean, in our current system, all money is credit, and I know there is a line of thought that says, oh, theres a difference between money and credit, but, in my mind, you cant really separated faith from money, all money has to have peoples faith and trust in it in order to make it what it is.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• money
• currency
• scrip
• complementary
• local
• community
• Berkshare
• Berkshares
• trade
• credit
• debt
• exchange
• economics
• economy
• unemployment
• crisis

[greenleaf76]

defo form of schizophrenia

[zthustra]

Money isn't a social institution, it is a physical tangible thing with properties and uses. Money facilitates more exchanges than bartering and gifting. The rapid exchange of goods and services facilitated by money is called velocity. The word you are looking for isn't credit, it is value. Money is a token for the value of the goods and services. Commodity money has both actual value and token value.

[valhala56]

This guy makes no sense. He talks like a schizophrenic.