That, dear reader, is the wrong question to ask, for money is a symbol, with no intrinsic value, and there no limit to how much money might be printed, (or, now, conjured up on the internet). What does money symbolize? Saint Thomas makes a distinction at the beginning of his treatise on the moral life (I-II, q. 5, a. 1), between two kinds of wealth (which may be defined broadly as ‘what people value’). There is natural wealth, all the good things we desire: food, sex, housing, land, clothing. These all maintain, or fulfill, our nature in some way.

To streamline trade in such goods, humans invented what Thomas calls ‘artificial’ wealth in its various forms – from seashells, to coins, to paper bills, to plastic credit cards, to the ones and zeroes of our modern bank accounts. Money is more or less a synonym for artificial wealth, whose only value lies in its link to natural wealth. Money can buy you a cheeseburger, or a house – even if money can’t buy you love.

There is a fine line between natural and artificial wealth, for we humans are never quite satisfied with just our basic needs. Once we have a house, we want a finer one, well proportioned, roomy, spacious, signifying in some symbolic but real way, our status in society. We want beautiful art and music and poetry, along with scrumptious food; we desire a spouse who is not only genetically compatible, but also a good conversationalist, a noble companion on the journey; and so on.

Even if money cannot buy all these things, it can buy some of them, and may be of benefit in gaining other more intangible goods. At the end of the day, money symbolizes – at a natural level – what we need and desire at a natural level, and is a means of attaining them.

There is – or should be –  a limit on artificial wealth: Namely, natural wealth. When money stops signifying what we actually want, when it becomes unhinged from the natural wealth it is meant to symbolizes, and, ultimately, when it can no longer ‘buy’ anything – that’s when the trouble starts.

Hence, a better way to frame the question is not ‘what happens when the money runs out’, but ‘what happens when trust in money runs out’. That is, when money no longer signifies what we need or desire, becomes unhinged therefrom, and reverts back to its own intrinsic value, which is, in a word, worthless.

Belief in the value of artificial wealth even has a term borrowed from Latin – credit, from credo, I believe. What happens when such credit is no longer believed? This is the problem with debt, borrowing upon the future, and consequent inflation. We spend money that we do not have, which means money that has lost its link to anything of true natural value, and so money loses own value. It’s not that things get more expensive (as the word ‘inflation’ implies), but that such depreciated money – artificial wealth – cannot buy as much natural wealth. It has been de-flated.

When this gets out of control, we have hyperinflation – which, again, is really hyper-deflation – and has occurred any number of times in history. As artificial wealth becomes ever-less ‘real’ – less linked ot natural wealth – we need for it to symbolize what little link there is left. Wheelbarrows full of money were needed in 1930’s Germany just to buy a loaf of bread. And in Robert Mugabe’s failed-state Zimbabwe, they had to start printing trillion dollar notes.

We used to keep a brake on the money supply to prevent such calamities. Such was the gold standard, that we could not print more money than we had in gold, itself albeit a sort of artificial symbol, but one that was rare, limited and hard to procure. Any money printed beyond the gold standard was counterfeit.

When we realized that we ‘needed’ – or, more properly desired – more money than we had in such gold reserves, driven in large part by the great expense of the First World War, we gradually abandoned the gold standard. Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, to increase the money supply his ‘New Deal’, spent his way out of the Great Depression, but at great cost, ordering every American to turn in their gold for an arbitrarily set ‘cash value’. The gold standard was finally and completely abolished by Nixon in 1973. Other nations have more or less followed suit, and now most money is fiat, ‘let it be’, conjured into existence, borrowed upon future generations.

So far, people have still sort of trusted money, even as it drifts more and more into an ever-more ethereal realm.  The United States debt in 1933 was $20 billion, which was a hefty figure. It’s now upwards of $22 trillion, which is more than a thousand times increase, and no one knows quite what that means. Canada is in the same leaky boat drifting out to the deep, dark sea of debt, ballooning into the trillion-dollar stratosphere under Trudeau.

Personal finances are analogous: most of us are in debt well beyond our eyeballs, drowning in it. (A current estimate says that Canadians owe $1.77 for every $1.00 they bring in). We borrow money from the future, to pay off our debts in the present. What this means in reality is that we print more and more artificial wealth, without any real hope that there is, even remotely, enough natural wealth to back it up, now, or a hundred years from now. We have adopted, even subconsciously, the fateful adage of Keynes’ ‘borrow like there’s no tomorrow’, for, after all, eventually ‘we’re all dead’. But then, the obvious reply to Mr. Keynes, is that our grandchildren may not be.

What happens when we can no longer pay even the interest on our loans, as we mortgage our children’s children to the umpteenth generation? What will unfold, not so much when money is no longer worth much (which has already happened), but when people start realizing this, that there isn’t much holding up the house of cards, and no longer believe in the giant Ponzi scheme we have built?

At the end of the day, money symbolizes not so much natural wealth, but the energy and motivation to work for wealth. And by ‘work’ is meant not just menial jobs, but drive, initiative, creativity, invention.

In other words, money is motivating, and there are few of us – the saints, perhaps, and mothers, who overlap quite a bit – who will work for nothing, motivated by the pure love of God and our fellow man.

The vast majority of people need and want a return on their work. If money becomes worth less, or even worthless, they will revert back to natural wealth, and getting what they can – a messy, brutish business, as various failed states evince (as in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, and China’s Great Leap Forward). There might be a sort of black market of bartering, but how does one exchange fairly? What is a dentist’s visit worth in chickens or eggs? How about math tutoring and piano lessons?

Of course, the government would likely step in and ration goods. But, as Stalin and Mao found out, it is difficult to force farmers to grow grain with the barrel of a gun. And try running that same farm with government workers, who will be paid whether they work, or not, or somewhere in-between.

And things may get even messier. Just imagine if, instead of going to the grocery store, and paying politely for your bread and cheese with your hard-earned money, everyone just grabbed what they thought they deserved, or needed, off the shelves? The produce would not last long, the weak would languish or starve, while the strongest and most violent would dominate. And they would not stop at food, but why not just usurp people’s homes and land?

As Pope John Paul II pointed out in Centesimus Annus, the State has a limited role: to ensure the legal conditions exist that people may gain private property by hard work; the protection of that property and its fruits; and to safeguard the stability of the currency, that is, money.

I will leave the reader to ponder how well our governments are succeeding in that, if they’re trying at all.

As one pundit put it, we’re all sliding off a cliff, and the loss in the ‘value’ of money is only part of our unmooring and unhinging. But there is hope, for we haven’t slid off yet. There are a few branches and rocks we can grab, and claw our way back to terra firma. But it will be a long slog, to convince people made dependent and indolent by socialism that it is only by hard work and living within our means that we will survive, to say nothing of prosper and thrive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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