Hm. That's not so much a model of money as a semi-historical plus functional account of it. In my mind, money can be boiled down to something like a promissory note (or SteveS' IOU, UOMe, or maybe even IOMe). And in that world, the whole system is built not on earning, assets, value, or whatever. It's based on trust/credit. As long as someone's "good for it", then the money's good.
Sure, even if the US is "good for it" or a lot of it, we could run up against some kind of combinatorial explosion, where it would take "us" longer than the lifetime of the universe to pay back whatever promissory note someone wanted to cash in. But that's where something like barter re-emerges - a coincidence of wants. And that's a high dimensional space. (Enter things like the parallelism theorem where we can trade space for time and vice versa.) So maybe we can't pay back a near infinite promissory note. But we can pay back some far less amount *and* compensate with goods in some of those other dimensions (like proxy war, THAAD, cyber defense, intellectual property, immigration, mineral rights, etc.). Now, as Marcus suggested, we're a wealthy country, not merely in money but also in nearly every other dimension because, at this point, we have a unipolar world. The US can barter with anything, including the lives of Palestinian children. Of course, Trump and Musk don't like that. What they want is to swap in their name. Rather than a unipolar world where the US is the monopole, they each want Trump|Musk as the monopole. Part of Trump's strategy is the Unitary Executive. Musk's strategy is less robust, relying more on runaway asset feedback and constant attention/grifting. (Thiel, Bezos, et al rely on a a more traditional secret backdoor/Manchurian key.) Regardless, the "spend less than you earn" is rhetorical prestidigitation that depends on people's over-simplified conception of money. As something of an anarchist-social-democrat, myself, I tend to think the world shouldn't be unipolar. So what Musk & Trump are doing to the US is kindasorta good. Burn it down a little bit so that another pole or 2 can arise. I'd prefer the EU as a 2nd pole. But that prolly won't happen. As long as Trump|Musk don't manage to achieve the swap, the outcome might be OK. (And I predict they won't because they're both chaos agents.) If another pole does arise, however, the US will be less trustworthy ... we may no longer be "good for it". But even then, it's not a matter of spend less than you earn. It's a matter of "what can you do for me today?" On 7/9/25 9:02 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
"/*Money isn’t zero-sum. The whole idea of 'don’t spend more than you earn' is not just wrong — it’s a misunderstanding of money*/." Now, I get the spirit of that — but hey, let’s give a nod to George Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” Maybe this idea isn’t wrong-wrong, but just wrong in a different way depending on your worldview. So here’s my (possibly equally wrong) model of money. Let’s put it on the table, kick the tires, and maybe even agree that both our models are wrong — but useful in their own peculiar ways. Big Picture First Humans make stuff. Other humans want that stuff. The trick is: how do we get the right stuff to the right people? One approach goes like this: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs,” and the government decides who makes what and who gets what. Sounds great, if your government is made up of wise, fair, well-informed people. Me? I’d love to live in that world. Show me a party run by such unicorns, and I’ll vote with both hands. But — and here comes the plot twist — in the real world, wise and fair leaders are a rare species. So we end up with something else. Enter the American Way In the U.S. (and most of the world), they use money as a sort of distributed ledger. No central master list — just everyone tracking value, trading labor or goods for money, then using that money to get what they want. This works way better than bartering chickens for shoes. In this system, money is really just a record — “Here’s what I contributed, and here’s what I can claim in return.” It’s flexible, decentralized, and surprisingly efficient. So far, no government in sight. But Wait — Here Comes the Government Governments step in because, well, someone needs to organize a few things we all need: roads, hospitals, armies, cat memes (okay, maybe not those). Also, someone has to stop the money system from melting down. To do this, governments collect taxes and (spoiler alert) borrow money. Borrowing isn’t bad, in theory. But here’s the rub: both major U.S. parties seem to have developed a taste for borrowing like there’s no tomorrow. Debt keeps growing, interest payments balloon, and one day — surprise! — the interest alone starts eating the budget. At that point, the government has a few not-so-great options: Print more money (hello, inflation), Raise taxes and cut spending (cue screaming), Or pretend everything’s fine (until it’s not). So What’s the Point? I’m not saying governments should never borrow. Borrowing to invest in people, infrastructure, or science makes sense — if it’s done carefully. But running constant deficits just to keep the lights on? That’s a recipe for future pain. In a perfect world run by wise leaders, debt wouldn’t matter so much. But in our world, the least-bad option might just be the old-fashioned advice: Try not to spend a lot more than you earn. Not because it’s always true, but because it’s a pretty useful model — at least until someone builds a better one. I'm all ears and like to evaluate different constructive options, don't just criticize what's wrong with the current system. On Wed, 9 Jul 2025 at 20:19, glen <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: And ... and and and, money isn't at all zero sum. The very concept of "don't spend more than you earn" is not even wrong. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of money. And Musk is a great example! When Tesla stock dives, Musk isn't losing what he's earned. Borrowing money to buy Twitter, collateralized against estimates of Tesla stock? Did Elno spend less than what he earned? No. Has he earned whatever "we" estimate his fortune to be? No. Toss in things like quantitative easing, the value of USD as the world loses confidence in it, etc. None of that over-simplified rhetoric makes any sense whatsoever. I'd love it if Elno stopped spending money *he* doesn't have. And if he did that, you'd see something magical happen, his name wouldn't be in the headlines every day. Just like with buying Twitter using imaginary money, the political party he wants to create is a mechanism for keeping his name in everyone's feed. He wants you to say his name every day, multiple times per day. Trump does the same thing. They want you to keep saying their name. Again. And again ... and again ... and again... all day every day. Why? Because we (at least in very developed countries) have an *attention* economy. The more you say their names, the more money they accumulate. That "huge personal hit" is at best empty rhetoric and at worst bullshit designed to distract you with one hand and pick your pocket with the other. On 7/9/25 10:14 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > We do have the money. We are a wealthy nation. The problem is we are cheap. > > *From: *Friam <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of Pieter Steenekamp <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> > *Date: *Wednesday, July 9, 2025 at 10:07 AM > *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> > *Subject: *[FRIAM] Musk’s America Party – Some Thoughts from Afar > > I’m not American—but I’m a big fan of the place. > > What really keeps me up at night is how both major political parties in the U.S. seem to have a shared hobby: spending money like it’s going out of fashion. Year after year, the national debt grows bigger, and the interest payments grow even scarier. It’s like watching someone keep swiping a credit card with no plan to ever pay it back. > > Now, let me put on my South African cap for a moment. > > When South Africa became a democracy and Mandela became president, things were looking financially grim. We weren’t flat-out broke yet, but we were close. Mandela then did something very clever: he made Trevor Manuel the finance minister. Manuel, being honest, told Mandela he knew nothing about finances. Mandela basically said, “Don’t worry about the details—we’ve got smart people for that. Just make sure we don’t spend more than we earn, and I'll politically support you.” And guess what? South Africa’s finances did great for a while. > > (Yes, it all fell apart later when Jacob Zuma came along, but let’s not ruin the story.) > > Back to America. > > No, I don’t think the U.S. is heading for an immediate meltdown—but the idea that it’s too big to fail? Not something I’d bet my pension on. Sooner or later, the debt monster will come knocking. > > Which brings me to Elon Musk’s political adventure. From where I sit, his main message is: “Hey folks, maybe we should stop spending money we don’t have?” Whether his new party takes off or not, I think it’s great that someone is at least ringing the alarm bell. > > Even if nobody listens, I’m 100% behind the effort. Musk is taking a huge personal hit—his companies, his wealth, all of it’s being affected. But if it helps America become more financially sensible, I say hats off to him. >
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