The most important tool humans ever mastered was fire.

The second most important is money.

With fire we unlocked a most ferocious power. The ways in which fire transformed everything are many, but I will discuss only the two I think most relevant. Amazingly, control of fire allowed us to cook food. Every animal must devote a significant amount of energy to actually breaking down and digesting food, including pre-fire man. With fire, primitive man could use the energy of burning wood to essentially prepare his food for easier digestion (with the added bonus of killing any parasites). This stone-age achievement was one of the first ways that we cheated nature. We no longer needed big energy-draining digestive systems because fire was doing that work for us. As time marched on and evolutionary processes could act we humans traded robust guts for energy-craving brains, brains which we could feed with that surplus provided to us by fire. It can easily be argued that without fire we as a species would still be in caves sucking marrow from deer bones instead of reading articles on the internet.

Fire is energy, energy that we apply instead of using our own natural features (teeth, digestive systems, claws, etc). This use of fire as energy has been with us ever since we captured and tamed it. From primitive bonfires to smith forges to steam engines and trains to nuclear energy today. I add nuclear energy to this list because it is yet another way we are cheating energy. Instead of using fire to heat water and spin turbines we break atoms. Both are energy.

Before money there was barter. You had sheep, I want lumber, we trade. From its embryonic beginnings money was simply a way of referring to other things. I had sheep, I traded those sheep to someone who wanted them and got money in exchange. I still want lumber, so when I find the guy who has lumber I give him the money, since we both agreed that the value of the money was equal to the sheep I would have traded in the previous example. Money is a tool that lets us trade our skills and services much, much faster than in a barter economy, and it also permits us to trade with people we don’t know since we don’t need to trust each other we only need to trust in the value of the currency we exchange (which historically was backed by gold, and today by the state).

Why have I been talking about fire and money in the same article? Because they are the same thing. Fire is energy, energy to cook food, energy to move a train… energy. Money represents fundamentally the effort of a human. In the examples of the previous paragraph I talked of wood and sheep. It takes the effort of a man to chop down the trees and cut up the wood into usable lumber. It takes the effort of a farmer to grow a carrot, for a potter to create a vase, for a carpenter to frame a house. Money then becomes a thing that can get things accomplished. Want to build a house? Use money. Want to go to the moon? Yep, money buys that too. People have in the past and will in the future do things for reasons other than money, perhaps mental illness or nationalism or many other reasonable reasons, but by and large today wherever we divert money collectively becomes a frenzy of activity and energy.

Money and fire are both dangerous tools, except we understand as a species the danger of fire yet seem oblivious to the frightening power of money. Presently in the West we are enamored with the idea of letting money be completely free, of letting natural (market) forces guide where money should flow. This is like chasing after a wildfire and picking valuables from the ash, total madness. Our ancestors made fire the slave of all mankind yet today we are all the slaves of money and we cannot see it, or cannot imagine a different world.

It is my earnest belief that we must transform our relationship with money, or at the very least understand and make concessions for the fact that it is such a powerful force. We allow private hands and indolent corporations to accumulate vast, incomprehensible sums of energy and potential activity in the form of money and sit on it, doing absolutely nothing with trillions of dollars that could represent vast projects and prosperity that could benefit all mankind. The Panama Papers illustrate this most plainly as we can see trillions of dollars simply held tight, clutched to the chest for fear of losing it. While some would argue that this is theft (and I would in fact argue that, in a different article) the most important thing to realize is that the Panama money is stagnant. Even simple analysis made from a perspective of the velocity of money shows that unspent money is worthless to an economy. Imagine for a moment if that money was in the form of gold bars, and if those gold bars were stacked into a pyramid. That pyramid would be roughly 1/7th the size of the Pyramid of Giza and would weigh over 900,000 tons. A 900,000 ton pyramid of gold would also be completely useless compared to how much economic activity and value could be produced if that unspent energy were used to motivate and move the economy, by, for example, creating a Mars program similar to the space program of the 60’s, or by funding a Basic Income, or creating grants for literally millions of small businesses. After all, 35 trillion dollars can buy a lot.

The specifics of what happens to offshore hidden money is important, but the underlying point that we absolutely must take away is that money represents accrued and potential human effort and activity. To squander it in a stagnant and troubled economy as we have in the West today is at best inefficient and at worst immoral.