How has the Meaning of Money Been Obliterated?

What does it mean to say the meaning of money has been all but obliterated? I’m not much of an economist so I enter this discussion with some hesitation, but there are a few simpler concepts that we can go over perhaps.

One of the important characteristics of money as a medium of exchange is that it should serve as a store of some sort of value when affixed to the objects to be exchanged. How is this value derived? Well that question usually leads back to the concept of supply and demand, which might be somewhat useful for explanatory purposes, as simplistic as that concept is.

So objects take on a value in accordance with how plentiful they are (supply) as well as how much people are willing to pay for those objects considering availability and desire for those objects (demand).

Problems do arise when we talk about supply and demand. We try to explain this with a model of individuals as rational participants in a free market possessing perfect information, but that’s going to run into problems of course. How much are people willing to pay for something? Are they forced to pay something, as is the case when there are monopolies or state coercion? Are they influenced to pay for certain things through social pressure and carefully tuned marketing tactics? How much of a choice do we have in what becomes widely produced and widely available considering the market forces generated by large economic entities such as a multinational corporation?

We can still agree, however tenuously, that our money holds some sort of agreed-upon value, though we will have to dispense of the notion that each of us is a free rational actor in a free market possessing perfect information. Insofar as our money circulates within a stable social system, however much force and manipulation is required to maintain that system, the money still manages to hold a universal value that is agreed upon, however passively, by market participants.

But the funny thing is now that very value, as asymmetrically contrived and artificially cultivated as it is, is itself under assault. And by the very participants that benefit from a stable monetary value no doubt! Short term gain always seems like a good idea until the long term effects begin to make themselves felt. That will happen soon enough I imagine.

Speculators manipulate currencies and energy and commodity prices in vast, carefully orchestrated abstractions in order to enrich themselves with values completely divorced from any physical production. Financial institutions generate huge unstable masses of fictional value by creating debt upon debt, manipulating each tier of debt to extract more and more fictional value from them, in turn destroying the productive classes that generate the value in the first place. Monetary value itself is bent and squeezed around the slow disintegration of the global working class and middle class.

So in effect, money is no longer some store of value that can be used as a medium for free exchange in a healthy economy, but a sort of tethering agent that ties us to an increasingly self-destructive economic system, the only purpose of which is to disproportionately enrich a parasitic oligarchic class.