Is there still any relation between money (currency) and real value?

Duplicating a FaceBook post, a contribution from Economist E. Rowe.


I asked: Is there still any relation between money (currency) and real value?

ER: hah.. big question. Money in and of itself, is a quantifiable social bond. It relates PEOPLE to each other. The "stuff" of the economy is secondary. Without people, money is worthless. So a great deal of the power of money is the perception of power by social groups that are bonded by your major powerbrokers in society, in our case the private corporate sector dominates the vast majority of the social space, and the state reinforces that power in a variety of methods (law enforcement, legal enforcement, monetary stability, etc..)

Arpie: Ha. What I'm thinking is, one of the reasons for the disconnect between who makes money and who adds "value" to the society (in the sense of the betterment of humanity as a whole) is that money does not reflect that value but rather, as you say, a "social" value. So the way to "make money" becomes not by creating something of actual value to mankind (say new technology like better ways of producing goods, food, medicine, etc.) but rather building "social value" that in and of itself reflects in making more money. I just think that this is part of the whole financial crisis, in that the quantifiably richer persons or entities didn't create real value but rather perceived social value and were rewarded for that alone.

ER: I think if you consider money as the fluid bond that can also be accumulated. The value of it is just a reflection of the power that those holding great stores of it have to coerce the rest of people. Much of our economy is built around extortion. Coordinator class types extort capitalists for as much as their rare skill set allows. Think of basketball or baseball players making millions from their owner employers. Owners obviously play the fact that if they are allowed to pick their employees, they can extort terms that the owner does not have to hire. Down the pyramid the leverage is less and less for workers, especially without collective bargaining. Money some, but not much reflection of the technological capacity or common good technology. Finance is the power to decide where to shape the development of various areas of the economy. But in our current form, it's the ability to shape it in such a way that the basic social relations between the many and the few remain empowering the few over the many, leaving them to continue to make the key decisions about where the bulk of investment should go. These decisions COULD be done by a government, or could be done by popular assembly or other various democratic mechanisms..even at the local level.