essays
Reflections on Money
by Kianga Daverington
September 1, 2020
This essay, written by Kianga Daverington of Daverington PLLC , was originally published in January 2020. The piece as been condensed for clarity.
Money is not a physical object like a coin, a bar of gold or a dollar bill. Money is at its core, a technology. It is a human invention designed to solve a specific set of human problems. Consider money, perhaps, in a new way. Think of money as a system for capturing time.
Time is the one thing we each have that is absolutely finite. We are born, we die, and the dash in between is all the time we have.
Think of production. We can usually produce more of some good by adding people to a task (also known as “WORK”). But we are still constrained by time. Whatever we produce is still limited by the amount of humans that can be organized to go into that production. Each of us possesses a limited amount of time available to us individually, so we need to convince or coerce others to add their time to ours if we want to achieve more than we can alone.
Out of this imperative, nations are born.
The most important quality of any particular form of money is how well it preserves the value of time over time. Can you buy the same amount of stuff or more in the future than you can buy today? If yes, congratulations - your money is accumulating time for you and future generations while you relax on the beach. If it takes more and more of a unit of money to buy the same amount of time in the future, well then I’m sorry, but that unit of money is getting weaker and weaker. It’s losing value or said another way – it’s losing purchasing power. The longer you hold it, the less it buys.
In a way, by purchasing goods and services, you are purchasing time. Every product and every service requires time to make and time to deliver - your time and/or someone else’s. The price therefore reflects the collective value of all the time put in. Money is a way we exchange time and move it around from where it is valued less to where it is valued more.
This is where prosperity comes from. It comes out of how well a society, collectively and each person, spends its time. How much time is spent creating and making? How much time is spent consuming? If we make more than we consume, we have something left over called wealth. If we consume more than we make, we are left with debt. You can’t consume what you don’t have, unless someone extends credit. Where does this “credit” come from? Basically –it’s made up.
Too much credit or debt eventually collapses and everyone is mixed up in the collapse.
If we understand that a unit of money represents a unit of time, and we understand time is limited, then a unit in a system of money with unlimited supply cannot have any value. This is the problem we are facing today with the world’s money supply. The supply of money in the world is increasing exponentially as central banks create money by giving loans to national governments, which is where our money comes from.
Our entire world financial system is a powder keg of debt.
National currencies today are known as fiat money, a currency without intrinsic value that has been given its power to be used as money by a government that says it is money by regulation. Wikipedia says, “Fiat money does not have use value, and has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.” Well said, Wiki.
A government’s job of maintaining the value of its national money boils down to a confidence game. On what basis do the people who use that government’s money believe it has value?
What happens to the money and those who hold it when the foundation of that belief begins to crumble?
essays
Border Thinking: Exclude or Relate?
by Josiah Heyman
July 29, 2018
This essay was originally written by Josiah Heyman for nacla and included in their Border Wars blog. It was published on 2/27/2017. Professor Heyman has updated the version below to reflect recent changes.
Josiah Heyman is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Interamerican and Border Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has worked in the U.S.-Mexico border region as a scholar and activist since 1982. Most recently, he co-edited The U.S.-Mexico Transborder Region: Cultural Dynamics and Historical Interactions.
When Donald Trump began his presidency, he proclaimed “a nation without borders is not a nation,” when issuing an executive order to build more walls along the Mexican border – although the United States already has plenty of border fence and other enforcement apparatus. This was the start of sustained rhetorical and administrative assault on borders, including airports and the northern border, but especially the border with Mexico. The assault has proceded up to today, involving many punitive and inhumane measures, including family separation.
As a scholar and a borderlander, I offer this essay (first published in early 2017) as a way to characterize and resist the vilification of the U.S.-Mexico border. I focus on the thinking itself, and set aside for the moment historical and social contexts.
But I close with thoughts about emerging alternatives, based on promoting, rather than severing relationships between people. This different kind of border thinking and acting inspiringly has occurred all over the country but it is especially deep and heartening when seen among the thousands of volunteers and small human rights organizations in the U.S. borderlands that have sprung into action in response to the border blockade, zero tolerance, and family separation policies. They have truly demonstrated in their sentiments and actions how borders build relationships.
In the polarizing view, a border divides in and out, here and there, self and other. It not only distinguishes, but it separates, actively pushing the sides apart. A wall, then, is a materialization of divisive thinking. Simplification often accompanies this process of drawing distinctions. Border lines slice apart gradation, making apparently clear and evident that which actually blends across society and space. Border lines also clarify—and in important ways deny—ambiguity, the simultaneity of differences and opposites. Yet, the world is gradated and ambiguous, and border thinking can easily oversimplify.
Signs, such as the border, pair something that performs representation (the signifier), like these words written in letters, or the physical presence of a wall or fence – and the meaning that is represented (the signified), the conventionally agreed meanings of these words or objects. Such combinations are fundamental to how we formulate and communicate thoughts. Signs often are complex and multi-layered, going beyond literal, one-to-one representations. Powerful signs, such as nation-state borders, condense many different meanings.
This process of condensation of various meanings has notable effects. Diverse meanings slip into each other; clarity of distinction weakens and unconscious substitutions and combinations take place. Borders are powerful agents transferring ideas and feelings between loosely related or unrelated geographies, social groups, and issues. The U.S.-Mexico border often attracts negative connotations, drawing rumors, suspicions, and dark interpretations. And when such ideas are stacked together, they are intensified, made visceral; trade policy, for instance, is made deathly frightening by condensing its meaning with sudden terrorist violence. Borders amplify; border talk is loud.
Condensation not only transfers or blends ideas, it also unifies. Multiple phenomena become one via the political rhetoric of “the border” (meaning above all, the U.S.-Mexico border), an unquestioned and impactful shorthand for diverse issues, feelings, and people. Assertions that hardly make sense by themselves become apparently obvious—naturalized—when locked together inside the sign of the border.
Unsurprisingly, border symbolism’s power to unify meanings serves nationalism, often a racialized version. Real nation-states are unequal and diverse, and have links across borders. But via condensation, these complexities are reinterpreted as a single unified package inside a bounded container – that is, the nation-state.
Such unification on one side, and separation from the other, mean that border thinking tends to deny basic processes of social life. It denies relations that span borders. While actual capitalism, for example, involves a variety of flows of investment, labor, inputs, consumer goods, information, and so forth, within boundaries and across boundaries, border thinking denies such uneven and combined exchanges in favor of an imagined closed national economy. Likewise, border thinking resists the co-presence and connectedness of differentiated and unequal people, whether already inside boundaries (such as immigrants of various statuses) or transnationally. This is not only a matter of social analysis, but also of ethics: Border thinking makes it harder to conceptualize people across boundaries, or migrants who cross them, as moral equals to those within.
In radically distinguishing between “inside” and “outside,” borders simplify each side. The inside is treated as a singular, cohesive entity. This often identifies insiders (archetypically, white citizens) with safety, well-being, and righteousness. The good but also vulnerable self is protected inside a powerful cover of nationhood—symbolically a safe home, as in “homeland security.” Sources of danger—especially unpredictable, mortal, and non-white ones—are relegated outside. In between the two is the perfect border that surrounds the home, protects from all danger, and filters in only good people and flows. The threshold of the home is particularly at risk. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas noted many years ago in her book Purity and Danger, people and things that stay inside conceptual distinctions and boundaries are ordinary, but those that cross such boundaries are impure, powerful, and dangerous. Perfect border visions are compelling drivers of politics because perfection of containment is desirable, but can never be achieved.
On each side of the border, inside and outside, drastic reductions take place. The complex geography of “good” and “bad” is simplified into binaries. The interior is seen as uniform, unified, and good, and the external world its precise opposite. Risks thus seemingly only come from outside and aim, like arrows, inward. Actual inside-outside relationships, such as transnational drug and arms trafficking, are obscured. In each case, the source of supply lies across a border from the place of demand, and a full perspective on the phenomenon requires both sides. To think that problems only come from the exterior, then, hides the partial culpability of domestic society, placing blame entirely on outsiders.
Furthermore, practical responses to domestic issues are easily displaced to the outer boundary, avoiding conflicts and complications. It is controversial and conflictive to enforce immigration laws inside the nation-state, such as by punishing employers, or conversely legalizing workers, as real struggles and dilemmas are transmuted into simple, magical answers: build a border wall.
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The abstract becomes real when we look to some of the recent allegations made in the news – such as unfounded allegations of terrorist activity on the U.S.-Mexico border— that find ways to justify such a vision of containment. Texas Governor Greg Abbot (among other politicians) has repeatedly—and wrongly—alleged that operatives of ISIS lurk in working class neighborhoods just south of the U.S.-Mexico divide, and sometimes covertly enter the United States. This helped to justify the escalation of enforcement at the border, such as the unnecessary deployment of a large force of Texas state police to the region, without a clear objective and in the face of evidence of low crime rates on the U.S. side. But why was such a preposterous story believable to a substantial audience in the first place? First, outside the border lurk strangers. Inside is the safe home, but at risk of penetration. Second, fear of such dangers are condensed together and then easily transferred, enabling transnational criminal organizations in Mexico and the United States to become politico-religious terrorists. Third, thinking that the inside is always innocent and uninvolved, and the outside is always the unique source of danger, denies actual connections of inside and outside, such as how ISIS emerged from the U.S.-initiated Iraq war. Finally, border symbolism is emotional and visceral.
While it is important to note that the U.S.-Mexico border has never had any involvement with terrorist travel, unlike airports, the Canadian border, and domestic terrorist activity, such factual replies are insufficient. Border action itself—such as the mass deployment of Texas state police—is a gesture toward making the world conform to an imagined ideal, not an assessment of factual realities and viable ways to improve them. If we are to change border thinking, we need to discuss ideals as well as arguing facts.
Governance means bring people together to discuss, make group decisions, and to pool and direct collective resources toward shared goals. We do not need to assume that such collectivities must follow current borders, but some jurisdictional boundaries are needed to constitute decision communities and governing areas. Furthermore, we have inherited territorial nation-states from the past, so change going forward will likely build on that framework.
To move forward and beyond a xenophobic form of border thinking, we might envision jointly the United States, Mexico, and northern Central America as overall single jurisdiction for safe and secure migration, and within it, regional jurisdictions for fair work, communities of decision-making, and earned membership, even as people flow in and out of them. Border thinking is unlikely to be banished altogether, so such arrangements would involve delineation of spaces at various scales. The challenge will be to recognize relationships across divides, such as the transnational relationship between immigrant-sending and -receiving communities, rather than giving in to the tendency of borders to separate endpoints of such relationships. To do this, we need to promote mutual moral recognition and reciprocity between immigrants and settled hosts.
We stand at a key junction. We can attempt to rectify the world to adhere to closed borders, in a way that damages human lives. This version of border thinking, that of Donald Trump, is at work when unauthorized parents are rudely picked up by ICE in trailer parks and shopping centers, and torn from their citizen children. Or, we can recognize that immigrants and hosts working and raising families over time make increasingly rich and strong relationships. Our border thinking must then encompass and serve such relationships in collective, democratic processes.