Mammonism

In the beginning, there is no money—people barter. I fish, you farm, and she weaves. We exchange our goods directly. Over time, issues of fair trade arise, and standard exchange ratios between various products are gradually established. For example, two pounds of fish equal one foot of cloth or three pounds of wheat. This direct barter, however, prove inconvenient. You might want my fish, but I need cloth, while she desires wheat. This complexity give rise to money as a medium of exchange, simplifying trade.

Initially, money takes the form of universally desired goods like salt or cattle. People first convert their products into such commonly desired goods, then use them to change for other products. For example, a pound of salt can trade for a foot of cloth, two pounds of fish, or three pounds of wheat, because the average labor employed in producing these quantities of product is equivalent. Eventually, precious metals like gold and silver become the preferred form of money, as these rare metals have high values, are easy to carry and store, and can be conveniently cut into pieces to accurately measure the values of other products.

People soon discover that this way of exchange is still cumbersome. Since money merely represents value, it needs not be a physical good itself. A piece of paper can do the same job and is much easier to carry. Thus money changes form from tangible goods to paper bills. Later, electronic transactions render even paper money unnecessary, leading to digital currency—electronic numbers stored on computers or mobile devices. These electronic numbers now become the life ambition of the modern people.

Initially, wealth accumulation is limited because agricultural products cannot be stored in large quantities. Trade serves daily consumption needs. But with money that is changed. Money can be accumulated indefinitely and passed on to future generations. Some people soon discover that they can make money without producing or owning anything, just serving as a middleman or broker. Thus trade is no longer for daily consumption. It becomes simply a means of accumulating wealth. More and more smart people leave manufacturing and enter trading and finance to make money by reselling other people's products or leveraging financial tools like lending, issuing stocks, and speculating. Some economic theories, such as mercantilism, financialism, and neoliberalism, argue that the economy should be driven entirely by market forces, and that trade and finance are the easiest way to build wealth. This results in a transformation of a production-oriented economy into a trade-oriented or finance-oriented economy. This phenomenon, known as deindustrialization, poses risks to national security, as intermediary activities and financial manipulation cannot replace real production capacity in times of war or embargo.

Trade, while lucrative, is rarely fair. One can only gain from the loss of others. For example, employers profit by taking advantage of employees whose labor generate greater values than the minimum wage they are paid. Wall Street exploits retail investors through dubious financial products. Insurance companies capitalize on people’s need for security, profiting from low-risk individuals. Similarly, pharmaceutical companies inflate drug prices, and hospitals charge exorbitant fees for basic care. I went to a hospital for a small skin condition. They sent me to a family doctor. This family doctor sent me to the lab, and then sent me to a dermatologist. The dermatologist diagnosed it as eczema without the need to see the test result. The prescribed cream cost $30 and the eczema was cured. But the hospital bill is $800.

This way, while the nation's physical wealth does not increase, some people can make a lot of money through unfair trade. This practice undermines the fundamental principle in trade. The essence of trade is the exchange of labor. A fair exchange reflects the equivalent amounts of labor involved in producing the products. Since the exchange ratios of all products are proportional, the increase in price of one product will trigger a chain reaction of inflation. As a result, houses, cars, groceries, utilities, services, all become more expensive. The victims are ordinary working people. In today's America, 63% of people are unable to pay a $500 surprise bill, but a handful of individuals, benefiting from this unfair system that they have created, have accumulated tremendous wealth that reached astronomical figures.

Greed knows no limit and most crimes, caught or not caught, are motivated by money. Noble causes intended to benefit the public, such as journalism, education and medicine, now all become means of making money, and money respects no morality. Clever opportunists who found ingenious ways to take advantage of others become winners. Honest working people become losers. As a result, people lost both confidence in fairness and motivation in production, fostering moral decay and opportunism. A worker once could feed the whole family, not anymore because the prices become so outrageous that women also have to work in order to maintain the same standard of living. Feminists may call it women's rights and equal opportunities. In fact it is the enslavement of women. As a woman lamented, "More and more women work extremely hard to make money now. Society provides women with less and less security. Security used to mean a commitment, a helping hand when cross the street, now it becomes the money in your pocket and a fully charged cell phone... We all yearn to marry a man, only to find ourselves turned into men."

When a society measures success by electronic numbers, permits a handful of oligarchs to accumulate unlimited wealth, allows the rich to influence legislation and policy making with their money, provides them with legal loopholes and preferential treatments, and treats them as model citizens, it is bound that people all want to get rich quickly, that corruption breeds and crimes grow, that the privileged few become the winner and the disadvantaged majority become the loser, that inequality and injustice increase, that society becomes more and more divided and polarized, that natural resources are depleted and the environment destroyed, that the state is turned into a cartel controlled by capital and special interests, and that politicians become more and more corrupt and shameless.

Capitalism, with its greed and profit-seeking nature, initially may stimulate the growth of an economy, but will inevitably lead to its hollowing out, corruption and failure. When an economy makes profit rather than production its top priority, when it's willing to sacrifice quality for profit, as Boeing did, when most of its manufacturing moved to low-cost countries, when its main components are no longer farmers and industrial workers but merchants, bankers, consultants, and lawyers, when its GDP comes primarily from the service and financial sectors rather than production, its failure is not far away. Capitalism is the cancer of the modern world, which turns people into slaves to money. When mankind invented money, nobody thought it would lead to the alienation of humanity. How to break free from this cycle remains one of the most pressing issues for modern thinkers (see America Is in Big Truoble).