Our Culture: Investing in Money

I believe there is such a thing as a perfect economy. This would be an economy running smoothly enough to be incapable of further growth, and not inclined to diminish.

A perfect economy implies that there be full market share of all businesses, especially banks. Banks are particularly important, because they fund new ideas (represented by entrepreneurs), and a full market share in this area implies no new ideas are currently available.

Full market share for businesses also means that business operations are sustainable. This means, among other things, that profits come from robust, sustainable growth. By robust, here, I mean that profits come from genuine market share, and not from, for instance, slashing costs and burning through third-world labor. Such cost-cutting techniques do not produce robust nor sustainable profits. Robust growth comes from opening new markets and increasing shares in old markets.

Now what I'm saying basically rests on what I consider to be a robust assumption: that it is possible to gain a maximum market share. I think not only that this is possible, but also that a lot of companies have already achieved this given today's economy.

Another implication has to do with the value of money. Money, itself being a commodity, also has a maximum share of market. It also must be managed in sustainable ways promoting robust growth. This sustainable growth responsibility lies with all of us, from ordinary consumers to Exxon-Mobil.But this is not to say that we need to be overly concerned with income inequality. Barking about income inequality is largely barking up the wrong tree, because the nature of new ideas is that they tend to concentrate wealth for their creators. However, if income inequality is produced by burning through labor resources by exploiting the poor, your wealth is not robust. I can handle inequality, provided the poor are not exploited. Inequality must be based on the production of new, valuable ideas.

Now all this is not to say that infinite growth is impossible, or that society must be stratified between rich and poor. On the contrary, infinite growth is definitely possible, but it must be robust, and rooted in such things as the continued evolution of the human mind and body, not in exciting, new opportunities, of which there are probably a finite number at any given moment. As for stratification, there will always be motion in markets, which implies liquidity in assets, including human ones. And anyway, I think we owe it to ourselves as human beings to offer the opportunity to all of us to live either simply or complexly, as we choose.