Money an Time III: Rich and Poor
The primise that money ultimately guarantee prosperity for all
The compulsion arising from money that demands everyone needs to get money has given people a colossal wealth of goods and an almost overwhelming dominion over nature. The states that adopt this compulsion try to implement it in every last corner of the world, thus easily making the promise that money, if it can just operate capitalistically and can always multiply, ultimately guaranteeing prosperity for all. A billion starving people, rapidly expanding impoverishment and a systematic destruction of nature that in the meantime threatens to ruin the whole planet condemn these promises most horribly as lies.
Money leads to money and more money leads to still more money
The survival of the capitalist system is based on its continued success at using money as capital: as money that yields more money. Thus this indispensable growth is only demanded from money itself: so that money is used to yield more money. And that means necessarily: the more money that’s in use, the more it can yield. Under the terms of capitalistic competition, therefore, also even this excess of money must be competed for, that an enterprise has to employ in order to make a profit. Thus the obvious consequences of a capitalistic economy further reinforce themselves: that only money leads to money and more money leads to still more money.
The survival of the capitalist system is based on its continued success at using money as capital: as money that yields more money.
Every attempt to evade this mechanism and, for example, establish “social justice” through appropriate taxes, is destined to fail. Even when, here and there, a “slum dog” makes it to millionaire, in general the poor do grow poorer and the rich richer. Taxing the latter means making the rich poorer and the rich would doubtless survive that but it would weaken their assets and thus their decisive ability to win profit. And this is in the interest not only of the respective capital owners but of everyone who is dependent on this economic system, even the poorest. Above all, however the capability of making a capitalistic profit must be in the interest of the states, exactly those who would have to impose such a weakening of capital owners’ assets – and who cannot do that. Because states in turn compete with one another over how much capitalistic business succeeds within their jurisdictions. States also therefore have the keenest interest that this amount is not trimmed. Consequently, this law of the multiplication of money remains inescapable.