Business
from Old English bisignes - "care, anxiety, occupation"; "trade, commercial engagements, mercantile pursuits collectively" is first attested in 1727 on the notion of "matters which occupy one's time and attention".
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We are ALL “in a busy-ness” which requires money. From the poorest single mom to the richest stockholder, money is a common, daily preoccupation which can unite or divide us in our individual lives. This is a human not merely a corporate phenomenon as our modern notion of “business” implies and it stems from the fact that God has given each individual the dignity of human energy to expend in the form of Labor … the most precious and personal resource we have, individually and collectively, as humans.
Furthermore, we know that those whose busy-ness allows them to produce more than they consume are able to Save … and that with this savings comes, among other things, the opportunity to Invest in the discovery and development of Tools which both enhance and compete with Labor. Thus the foundational equation of all economics is:
Man’s Material Well-bring = Natural Resources + (Labor * Tools) ... or ... MMW=NR+(LxT)
Our choice to use Labor or Tools in our busy-ness depends on the relative cost of each with the cost of Labor being Wages and the cost of Tools being Interest. Accordingly the balance between Labor and Tools is dependent on the relative levels of Wages and Interest.
As economist Ludwig von Mises explained in his 1958 address on Liberty and Property”, the properly functioning linkage between Labor, Wages, Savings, Investment, Tools and a Middle Class is the essence of Capitalism as a system of busy-ness:
“[O]ne does not exhaustively describe the sweeping changes that capitalism brought about in the conditions of the common man if one merely deals with the supremacy he enjoys on the market as a consumer and in the affairs of state as a voter and with the unprecedented improvement of his standard of living. No less important is the fact that Capitalism has made it possible for him to save, to accumulate capital and to invest it. The gulf that in the pre-capitalistic status and caste society separated the owners of property from the penniless poor has been narrowed down.”
However, central bank Fiat Credit [including fractional reserve bank lending] is the Financial Simulation by elites which supplants Labor’s Real Savings. It systematically and artificially
stimulates debt-based over-consumption [the opposite of Real Savings]
by suppressing Interest relative to Wages,
which simultaneously subsidizes Tools and Capitalists while suppressing Wages and Labor,
causing the long-run substitution of Tools for Labor,
which impoverishes Labor and reduces consumption [and with it the demand for both Labor and Tools],
systematically shifting the long-term balance between Labor and Tools [and destroying the Middle Class],
widening the income and wealth gaps between Labor and Capital,
resulting in all manner of social [and environmental] injustice and disorder ranging from broken families and abortions to homelessness and riots [and climate destabilization].
If this chain of hard-to-diagnose causes and effects set in motion by Fiat Credit seems long and confusing, it is because money touches everyone's busy-ness in multiple ways that change over the short and long run as noted by JM Keynes in this quote [which is also on the Civics page of this website]:
"Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." The Economic Consequences of Peace 1920
This Fiat Credit monetary perversion [known as Crony Capitalism] has replaced Mises' properly functioning Capitalism as our official system of busy-ness and spawned a multitude of simultaneous deformations and disasters which seem completely unrelated to the casual observer.
Sociologically the central planning that sustains crony capitalism has set us on what FA Hayek called “The Road to Serfdom” which eventually leads to what Horace Mann called “the revenge of poverty against wealth” which we are increasingly witnessing worldwide as unjustly impoverished Labor rises up in every possible way against its ruthless, elite financial oppressors ... but [as Keynes predicted] without being able to properly diagnose the symptoms and articulately treat the cause of its suffering.
Environmentally crony capitalism's requirement for the continuous stimulation of over-consumption [which is euphemistically called growth] has disturbed the balances of nature and is increasingly implicated in public health crises and climactic changes causing mass extinctions of life [plant, animal and human] on earth.
For the sake of everyone's “busy-ness” … large and small … present and future ... we must eliminate crony capitalism by reforming and restoring HONEST MONEY.
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