MONEY

MONEY

 

            Money plays a central role in determining the course of our everyday life. Prices and inflation are directly linked to the nation’s money supply, and many economists believe that changes in the quantity of money also have important effects on the real economic variable, such as unemployment and gross domestic product, especially in the short run. Yet many of the models that economists use to evaluate fundamental questions relating money and monetary policy to economic activity tend to gloss over the underlying characteristics of the economy that motivate the use of money. Economic models that simply assume currency is valued overlook these characteristics and possibly the important properties of money that influence the way its supply affects the economy. Understanding these properties will provide a better idea of not only the key features of money that associate it with “value” but also how those characteristics affect the link between the quantity of money and aggregate economic activity.

            This distinction between the good and the just is prefigured by Aristotle’s distinction. One treats property always as a means to some further end; it treats it teleologically. The pursuit of money for its own sake is unnatural, but it provides an escape from the enslavement that is the necessary consequence of the perfectly natural association. To be natural, the city cannot be a perfect whole. The perfection of the whole would preclude the freedom of the parts. The household is what it is because it exists within a community; to attempt to model the community on the household is to make the mistake of thinking the household would remain what it is without the restraint of the society.  criticizes the explicit teaching of the Republic for not taking into account that, in a city where every woman of a certain age is your mother, you will in fact have no mother. There is no discoverable distinction between the good, understood as the useful, and the just. For Aristotle, according to whom nature never makes something with a dual purpose, does not mean to say that we have logos in order to make clear the useful and harmful and also the just and the unjust. He means, rather, that the purpose of logos is to make it possible to indicate the useful and the harmful so as also to indicate the just and the unjust. It is by indicating the use of things that we come willy-nilly to the question of justice and injustice. This is what it means for the household is the central ground of the good life.

             terminology is very loose, and perhaps because of this the translations do not always distinguish carefully or consistently in Aristotle’s “true wealth”, or wealth getting which aim at them respectively. This is a common fault, which often obscures Aristotle’s thought. There is another variety of the art of acquisition which is commonly and rightly called the art of making money, and it has in fact suggested the notion that wealth and property have no limit’.

            e gives us an account of nature in the Physics which is adequate for his immediate purposes there, but gives little indication of his broad deployment in the ethical and political works of the concept of the natural. He never systematically investigates nature as an ethical or political concept. Had he done so, he could not have failed to see that there are some tensions within the roles he assigns to the natural. He might thereby have avoided several problems, including one of his most unfortunate legacies that of reactionary political attitudes which have appealed to nature, often in Aristotle’s name, to uphold existing inequalities in society, such as slavery and the subordination of women. Some of this legacy has got attached to  unfairly; appeals to his works to defend race based forms of slavery, for example, are patently specious. However, Aristotle’s own lack of precision about the role of nature in his ethical and political arguments must bear some of the responsibility.

             prepares the ground for his own account of happiness by saying that the good we are looking for must be an end with two special properties. First, it must be a specially end: it must to use a more traditional translation be perfect by comparison with other ends. That is to say, it must be something sought always for its own sake and never for the sake of anything else. Secondly, it must be self sufficient that is, it must be something which taken on its own makes life worth while and lacking in nothing.

            Happiness as  says, has both these properties. What then is happiness? To elucidate this we must consider the function of man. Man must have a function because particular types of men (e.g. sculptors) do, and parts and organs of human beings do. What is it? Not life, not at least the life of growth and nourishment, for this is shared by plants, nor the life of the senses, for this is shared by animals. It must be a life of reason concerned with action: the activity of the soul in accordance with reason. So the good of man will be his good functioning: the activity of soul in accordance with virtue. If there are several virtues, it will be in accordance with the best and most perfect virtue.

             does not maintain that a happy man is self sufficient he makes this plain when he discusses the question whether a happy man needs friends but he does think that contemplation alone is sufficient to make a man happy, and he gives as a reason for identifying happiness with contemplation that the contemplative approaches self sufficiency more closely than the pursuer of the active life. The contemplative, no less than the just man, will need the necessities of life, but he will not need beneficiaries of his well doing, and he will be able to theorize alone, even though he will do it better with colleagues.

Simple Living and American Dreams

            The American dream was never meant to be a zero sum solution: the goal has always been to end up with more than you started with. Even the Puritans, whose dream in its purest formulation was about as selfless as any in American history, and who were as skeptical of human will as any people in the Western world of the last five hundred years, nevertheless acted from this premise. There’s really no other way to understand their migration except as motivated by a belief that it could procure some gain, if not for themselves in providing a reassuring sense of purpose, then at least for the good of their children and community, who might yet be saved even if they themselves were not. Other believers then and since were not nearly as circumspect about their errands in the wilderness, acting with confidence that they could secure their futures in the next world through good works in this one. In all these cases, however, this was the dream of the good life as a spiritual affair.

            The idea of the American dream has been attached to everything from religious freedom to a home in the suburbs, and it has inspired emotions ranging from deep satisfaction to disillusioned fury. Nevertheless, the phrase elicits for most Americans some variant fantasy of a new world where anything can happen and good things might.

            Millions of immigrants and internal migrants have moved to America, and around within it, to fulfill their version of the American dream. By objective measures and their own accounts, many have achieved success. Probably just as many have been defeated and disillusioned. Millions of other immigrants were moved to America despite their preferences and have been forced to come to terms with a dream that was not originally theirs. How they have done so, and how their experiences compare with those who came to America to seek their dream.

            But one cannot address that subject, nor eventually move beyond it to evaluate the future of the American dream and its society, without knowing what the dream is and how it operates.

            The pursuit of success warrants so much fervor because it is associated with virtue. “Associated with” means at least four things: virtue leads to success, success makes a person virtuous, success indicates virtue, or apparent success is not real success unless one is also virtuous.

            That quintessential American, , conversely, Proverbial sentences, chiefly such as inculcated industry and frugality as “the Means of procuring wealth and thereby securing virtue, it being more difficult for a man in want to act always honestly, as it is hard for an empty sack to stand upright.” Finally, mere wealth may actually impede true success, the attainment of which requires a long list of virtues. Americans have learned Franklin’s lessons well: they distinguish between the worthy and unworthy rich, as well as the deserving and undeserving poor. For example, most Americans characterize “yuppies” as people who “play fashionable games” and “eat in trendy restaurants,” and on the whole they enjoy watching such forms of conspicuous consumption. But they also characterize yuppies as selfish, greedy, inclined to flaunt their wealth, and imbued with a false sense of superiority.

            There is no doubt where Thoreau stands in the confrontation between spiritual and material values. He tells us that “wealth itself is a curse because, it enslaves us” Trade and money are unequivocally deprecated as measures of worth. Thoreau contrasts the miserly legal owner of the land with persons like himself, whose love and enjoyment of it are not profit oriented. He plays off multiple meanings dazzlingly, noting that any un-saleable aspect of the landscape is worthless to the farmer: “there was nothing to redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes.” In the word “redeem” we hear both economic and religious reverberations. Combining the values of a pawnbroker with those of a preacher, the farmer reveals that for him monetary and religious “redemption” are one and the same. Speaking of this same farmer,  it was no privilege to him to behold, i.e., he does not exercise the real and inherent “privilege,” or advantage, of living on the land, but merely holds his legal “privilege,” or title. On this man’s farm nothing grows free, nothing grows unconstrained and unregulated because nothing is without its price.

            Certainly, it is no secret that concerns spending. To discover how to earn and spend our wakeful hours whatever we are doing is the task of as a whole. does not permit these terms to rest drowsily in a context of financial loss and gain. Rather, he wakes them, makes them metaphors for forgotten spiritual and organic values. He subverts both the business ethic and the dull round of language itself. Each economic word contains within it an alarm of meaning that prevents us from falling into a sleepy discourse with the surface of the text.

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