Free will allows us to choose. But we have incomplete knowledge, and so will often make errors. However, this does not mean that sins arising from an incomplete data set are not our fault. Rather, we have a duty to create as complete a data set as possible, lest we fall back on this as an excuse. Such sins of commission arise from a sin of omission in learning.
Skins, pots, beads, gold, coins, camels, land, wine, stamps … throughout history and across the world communities have had different stores of value. The innovation of coinage created liquidity for barter economies, and the innovations of credit and fractional reserve banking have accelerated this liquidity to a froth. Stiglitz and others talk about economies as being reducible to information. Perhaps it helps to regard the universal store – the universal language – as value itself, as expressed through price. This abstracts from the material into the relative and, communicated through information flows, allows a more exact matching between supply and demand. Meanwhile, people have themselves become banks, living on fractional reserves, such that their lives become a house of cards, held up by trust, a trust in the faceless millions whose total actions sustain a securitised economy. Read More
