Economics: Magic or Science

There is a widely held and prevalent belief that money, whether it be paper or electronic, in itself has value. This magical belief is proven to the holder of such due to the empirical proof that a quantum of money can be exchanged for "x." Where x may any good or service available to be sold on the "marketplace." We hear many voices today during the current pandemic promoting a universal guaranteed income. Whether a true believer in money as value be conservative or liberal only changes the complexion of whose interests are considered paramount. The rugged self made individual heroically navigating the free market or the downtrodden and exploited "people."

The flip side of the coin to these worldviews, however can be just as wrong. The belief not in money per se, but in some source of static physical commodities. The populist will often maintain that gold is real money because it is a physical good. Again one can substitute any physical good, whether relatively perishable or not, in this particular equation.

What is missing here is that in this algebraic mentality that there is economic "stuff" as a given. Instead of locating the process of physical production itself as the primary "stuff" of an economy. Now this correct and scientific standpoint is found throughout history in either explicit terms or in practice. The outstanding modern references appear most distinctly in the writings of Gottfried Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Carey and Lyndon LaRouche.

The axiomatic presumptions of all but a very few in this regard are indeed akin to the blind leading the blind. And the current course of Wall Street bailouts of untold trillions, or rather, quadrillions in putative monetary values if not reversed will soon prove that such presumptions have been grossly in error all along...