MINDING YOUR OWN BUSINESS
Introduction Risk & Investment Wealth & Power People & Communities Sustainability & Relationships Industrial Estates or Work Parks Uniformity or Diversity return to top page 3. WEALTH & POWER At root, the use of money is a transaction between individuals, a reckoning of the relative worth of goods and services being exchanged. The central problem with the money economy is that it has lost this human dimension. It has become the one and only end, and human need, or even basic humanity itself, has become subordinated to it. The catalogue of economic woes that afflict our society - from redundancy to house repossession, from benefit fraud to insider dealing - all stem from the institutional nature of money and its consequent tendency to ride rough shod over real, flesh and blood human beings.
If such a fundamentally life threatening system seems to be an inevitability in the kind of society we inhabit, it is worth remembering that money was not always the dictator it is today. From time immemorial, absolute rulers have held spectacles, created public and private works and amassed treasures for no other reason than that it pleased them. The building of the great mediaeval cathedrals did not represent a return on an investment - at least not in this life - rather an expression of ecclesiastical will allied to a populist tide of feeling.
To be sure, in both these examples there had to be wealth and the material base to sustain what was achieved. Such magnificence may also have required a peasantry to be bled dry but the important thing is that wealth did not determine what was, or how it should be, achieved. It was a means to, rather than an end in itself.
If one had to choose between the rule of money and that of autocratic individuals whose only constraint might be the perception of where their own self-interest lay, most of us would opt for the former. That, at least, has been the triumph of the Western nation state, the spreading out of power so that no one individual, or group of individuals, has absolute control. And the growth in the money economy - the objectification of exchange - has been central in that process.
At the same time the limitations on the use of power - that may once have been enshrined in a constitution or credo - have also become dispersed in a tangle of arcane and conflicting legislation so that, truly, the only test has become, "did it make money?". As the units of the world economy grow ever bigger - whether in terms of multi-national companies or super states such as Europe - this tendency will only increase. People will cease to matter except in so far as they contribute to the health, or otherwise, of the bottom line on the balance sheet.
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