on money (in the abstract)

[alice wellintown]

> a fourth reason - one which is vastly more compelling to me, anyway -
> is that the monetary rewards of lending money and mucking about with
> stocks and such are seen to be disproportionately great compared to
> the rewards of other, equally necessary activities

Reminds me of that fine book on Information I picked up after it was
touted here and specifically of the marvelous chapter on Babbage. To
make his computer, Babbage, after finally winning the  Newton position
and admittance to the Society, from this he earns a decent salary and
need only continue his vocation, he is not obliged to teach napping,
distracted, multitasking kids or lecture to an empty hall, then his
old man, who never trusted his son to amount to anything, dies and he
inherits a fortune, then he hires several craftsmen of great skill,
clears out his barns and begins building his machine prototypes,
larger and more complex, these expand his conception of the machine's
potential and he raises more funds and tinker... tinker. But all those
gears, claws, pins, axles, wheels, that Flood of carried differences
calculated, all that is no longer needed. What a clunky pile of parts
is Carl Barrington, made up of the junk yard waste, trash dumped on
his integration, and only come here to entertain a bunch of kids. The
Negro president, like divinest sense, is led straight away with a
chain.

> what it comes down to, is they have a strong union.  They might not
> call it that, but that's what it is, wouldn't you say?

No. It's not organized in the Union sense at all. One of the reasons
it is disproportionately compensated.  It's a cult with charismatic
leadership.

>
> ...a strong union, and little or no sense of solidarity with other
> professions...

All other professionals are slaves.


>
>
> alice wellintown wrote:
>> Angry that the world is so unfair? Infuriated by fat-cat capitalists
>> and billion-bonus bankers? Baffled by the yawning chasm between the
>> Haves, the Have-nots – and the Have-yachts? You are not alone.
>> Throughout the history of Western civilization, there has been a
>> recurrent hostility to finance and financiers, rooted in the idea that
>> those who make their living from lending money are somehow parasitical
>> on the 'real' economic activities of agriculture and manufacturing.
>> This hostility has three causes. It is partly because debtors have
>> tended to outnumber creditors and the former have seldom felt very
>> well disposed towards the latter. It is partly because financial
>> crises and scandals occur frequently enough to make finance appear to
>> be a cause of poverty rather than prosperity, volatility rather than
>> stability. And it is partly because, for centuries, financial services
>> in countries all over the world were disproportionately provided by
>> members of ethnic or religious minorities, who had been excluded from
>> land ownership or public office but enjoyed success in finance because
>> of their own tight-knit networks of kinship and trust.
>>
>> Despite our deeply rooted prejudices against 'filthy lucre', however,
>> money is the root of most progress.
>>
>> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97395387
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 10:25 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>> Nowhere did I say that "there is an ongoing war between
>>> the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless" . That is simply inaccurate. I agree that there is a dialog of kinds between the monopolizers and those they injure and OWS is one face of that dispute. I am not against money. It's convenient and very useful as a medium of exchange. I'm trying to think and talk about how it seems to work.
>>>
>>> As for your hard to parse final sentences,   I think my personal answers are yes yes and so what, but I've never understood most of what you write.
>>> On Nov 24, 2011, at 8:47 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>>
>>>> Right. ...the first sentence is dotted to the post that I replied to.
>>>> In that post the author claimed that there is an ongoing war between
>>>> the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless. I said it is not
>>>> war, but human evolution sped up by technology.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> This is not a war. It is human adaptation, co-evolution, if you
>>>>>> prefer,  or simply response to opportunities Those who can monopolize,
>>>>>> regardless of the waste they produce and how much damage they do, are
>>>>>> the fittest. But, with the revolution in communications technologies,
>>>>>> those who were exploited because they were unaware of how the fittest
>>>>>> came to monopolize, are now more aware. And, because they now sense
>>>>>> that they need to defend themselves, they are doing so. We adapt by
>>>>>> culture, by attitude, with technology. We copy certain patterns in
>>>>>> evolution and then speed them up. So we have rockets instead of
>>>>>> Plastic Man arms that can stretch across continents.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Money will survive. So will the banks, the investment houses, the
>>>>>> political systems. So will, in the short term, an impoverished world
>>>>>> for those who now call themselves the 99% or whatever percent, who
>>>>>> are, for the most part, folks who are better off than most and only
>>>>>> now realizing that this is not their birthright and that they need to
>>>>>> fight to keep this position in the world. This is war.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Can you live without it? Are you fit for that? I doubt it.
>>>
>>>
>>
>