People say things like “I think money is…” as if money isn’t universally understood. Rest assured, money is and has to be unambiguously and precisely defined, whether you grasp the definition or not. The whole world can’t be simultaneously participating in a system of measuring wealth if the system doesn’t have very specific rules. We won’t be able to address problems with money until we’re talking about it accurately and concretely. 

Money exists because everything we need in life — food, shelter, clothing — takes labor to acquire. If we each could meet all our own needs, we wouldn’t need money because we wouldn’t be exchanging our labor. Money simply allows me to work as a carpenter and trade some of my carpentry output for some of your output as a plumber. Rather than try to trade a dresser I built for your labor installing a kitchen sink, we create dollars as a go between. What those dollars ultimately represent is hours of labor. It’s just a voucher for your time. It basically says, “I spent an hour building things with wood that are now available in the market at large, so I’m entitled to an hour’s worth of other output also available in the market”.

When we buy things, we don’t pay the cost of producing them, we pay what’s called equilibrium price. If there aren’t enough widgets for all the people who want a widget, the price of widgets is raised until enough people decide against buying a widget, and the number of people who remain that are willing to pay the new higher price for widgets is equal to the number of widgets available. 

Similarly, when proprietors shop for widget-makers, they also pay equilibrium price for their labor. The result of this is that a widget shaper makes $20 an hour, and a widget polisher makes $10 an hour. This is the same thing as saying one hour of the widget shaper’s time is worth two hours of the widget polisher’s time.

This differentiation in the value of labor hours is the creation of classes and the root cause of unemployment. It is unnecessary and unjustified. It is born out of the contrivance that is the “proprietor”, who is someone that “borrowed money” from a bank, to which he owes “interest”, and the only way he can pay interest is by earning “profits”. Really, the proprietor is just a manager, which is another skill, like widget shaping and widget polishing, and really, the bank didn’t “loan” the proprietor money it “had”, as much as it recorded that the proprietor owed him interest. 

The concrete solution I offer to the world’s problems begins with the refusal of dollars (or any currency) and the insistence for wages being paid in person-hours. After all, if you had to make your own shoes and roof your own house, the cost of spending an hour doing one would always be exactly one hour doing the other. 

Now… I’ve had this conversation enough times to know you probably disagree. I fully expect that. What I’m looking forward to being surprised by is your alternative explanation. To disagree with me, you have to offer a better, or at least equal, explanation for what a dollar actually “is”. What are they? Where do they come from? How many are there in circulation at any given time? Does the bank actually loan you dollars it has in its possession? Why do you get them just for doing your job? Why do you get more than some other type worker? What is inflation? Did you research any of these answers, or just voice your assumptions? Your answers to these questions must offer the promise of being found mathematically rugged.