Money Should Be Free

Imagine a world where money flows like words through the airwaves, a filthy river of greenbacks coursing through every gutter and alley, seeping into the cracks of society, soaking the earth, drowning the parasites and the predators alike. A glorious torrent, unfettered by the iron bars of bank vaults, slipping past the sticky fingers of Wall Street sharks, flooding every slum and penthouse until no one can hoard, no one can starve, no one can die for the lack of it.

This is the vision, the fever dream of a society where cash isn’t chained to the whims of the suits, isn’t corralled behind the velvet ropes of high finance, but is free—wild and unruly—as free as the foul-mouthed graffiti scrawled on the underpass, as free as the bile spewed by the demagogues and the dissenters on late-night radio. Money, unbound, loose in the streets like a pack of feral dogs, gnawing at the edges of the old order, tearing down the ivory towers with every snarling bite.

Money should be free like speech, like the words we spit and the lies we tell, the truths we barely dare to whisper. No more should it be the domain of the privileged, locked away in Swiss accounts and Cayman havens, but instead a tool, a weapon, a voice for every bastard son and daughter of the American Dream, every poor sucker born on the wrong side of the tracks, every down-and-out loser with a fistful of dreams and a pocket full of nothing.

But they fear it. They fear what happens when the floodgates open, when the dollar isn’t shackled to a price tag, when every man, woman, and child holds the same power in their hands as the boardroom elite. Because money, like speech, is dangerous when it’s in the hands of the many. It breeds chaos, it sows dissent, it upends the delicate balance of power that keeps the machine churning and the masses in line.

So they keep it locked up, parceled out in tiny doses, just enough to keep the gears turning, just enough to keep us hungry, desperate, begging for scraps. They know that if money were free—truly free—like speech, like thought, like the anarchic energy that pulses in the veins of every street corner prophet and half-crazed preacher, the whole rotten system would come crashing down, the pyramid of power collapsing under its own bloated weight.

Free money, free speech—two sides of the same damned coin, the currency of revolution, the language of the oppressed. And until they’re both free, really free, we’re all just slaves to the same old gods, dancing to the same old tune, while the fat cats sit back and laugh at the spectacle of it all.

Let’s cut through the bullshit. The objections to making money free like speech are nothing more than self-serving garbage, concocted by those with a vested interest in keeping the rest of us under their heel. They wave around words like “inflation” and “economic instability” like they’re some kind of holy scripture, but it’s all a smokescreen—a sleazy con game designed to keep the power where it’s always been: in the hands of the rich and the ruthless.

The fear of hyperinflation is the first line of defense for these bastards. They’ll tell you that if everyone had access to money, the economy would spiral out of control, that prices would skyrocket, and the whole system would collapse. But let’s be real—this assumes that the only economic model worth a damn is the one that keeps their coffers full. What they won’t tell you is that the current system is already on life support, propped up by the same handful of bankers and politicians who have rigged the game in their favor. So who are they really protecting? Not you, not me—just their own bloated wallets.

Then there’s the tired old line about “loss of incentive and productivity.” The idea that without the threat of poverty hanging over your head, you’d just sit on your ass all day is a goddamn lie. They want you to believe that money is the only thing that drives people to work, but they’re deliberately ignoring the real motivations—passion, creativity, the desire to build something meaningful. Free money wouldn’t kill productivity; it would set it free, unshackling us from soul-sucking jobs and letting us chase our real dreams. But of course, the last thing these parasites want is a population that’s not chained to the grind.

And then they start whining about “widening inequality,” as if that’s not the most hypocritical pile of horseshit you’ve ever heard. The same people who’ve been exploiting every loophole to hoard wealth are suddenly worried that free money would somehow screw over the little guy? Give me a break. The truth is, they’re terrified that if money were free, their precious system would implode, and with it, their stranglehold on power. Free money wouldn’t widen inequality—it would level the playing field, giving everyone a fair shot at the game.

Oh, but the poor banks! The poor investment firms! “Undermining financial institutions,” they call it, as if that’s something to be concerned about. Let’s get one thing straight: these institutions exist to serve themselves, not the people. They’ve been sucking the lifeblood out of the economy for decades, and now they want you to believe that without them, society would crumble. What a load of crap. The truth is, they’re scared shitless of losing their relevance, of waking up in a world where they can’t dictate the terms anymore.

“Moral hazard,” they cry, as if letting people have money would turn us all into reckless idiots. What they really mean is that they don’t trust you to make your own decisions—they’d rather keep you on a short leash, afraid and obedient. But the real hazard is letting these assholes keep calling the shots, because they’ve already proven they can’t be trusted. Free money would strip away their control, and that scares the hell out of them.

They love to talk about “corruption and misuse of resources,” as if the current system isn’t already a cesspool of corruption. The difference is, under their system, only the rich get to be corrupt. Free money would democratize power, and that’s the last thing they want. They’re not worried about corruption; they’re worried about losing their monopoly on it.

Then there’s the bullshit about the “devaluation of labor and skill.” They’ve got you convinced that the only way to value work is with a paycheck, but that’s just another way to keep you in line. There’s plenty of work that’s vital to society—caregiving, teaching, creating—that’s already undervalued because it doesn’t rake in profits for the elite. Free money would let people pursue the work that matters, instead of just what pays. But they can’t stand the thought of a world where they can’t exploit your labor for their gain.

Finally, they’ll throw out the “erosion of social contracts” argument, as if the current social contract isn’t already broken beyond repair. The reality is, the contract they’re so keen to protect is one that keeps them at the top and everyone else fighting over scraps. Free money would mean rewriting that contract, making it fair, making it just. And that, my friends, is what they’re really afraid of—losing their grip on the power they’ve so carefully rigged in their favor.

So don’t buy the bullshit. The cons against free money are just the desperate last gasps of a dying system, clinging to whatever scraps of control it can still grab. They’re scared, and they should be. Because when money is free, so are we.

The Gap Between the Sign and the Value

Let’s call it what it is—the gap. The distance between the sign and the value, between what’s real and what they tell you is real. You hold a dollar in your hand, crisp, clean, stamped with symbols and numbers. They say it has power. But the power isn’t in the dollar—it’s in the belief, the collective hallucination that this piece of paper, this sign, has value. And the farther we go, the bigger the gap becomes. More signs, less value. More noise, less meaning.

Finance is a hall of mirrors, reflecting back at you endless possibilities, none of them quite real. You think you’re making choices—invest here, buy there—but what you’re really doing is feeding the machine. You’re part of the spectacle, caught in the loop of generating signs—money, contracts, assets—that only exist to sustain themselves. It’s counterfeiting in the purest form, a conjuring trick that turns air into wealth and wealth into power. But where’s the value? Where’s the substance beneath the sign?

On the reactionary side they tell you Money used to be a stand-in for something real—gold, labor, land. Now it’s a stand-in for itself, a self-replicating loop of signs that point to nothing. And yet they do not seem to have a problem with the shapes it creates at the top. It shapes everything. It decides who eats and who starves, who drives a red Ferrari and who’s left with the scraps. Every dollar is a vote, they say, but it’s more than that—it’s the architecture of our reality. The economy bends to those who hold the most signs, and the rest of us? We’re left living in the gaps, in the spaces between the choices we never really had.

The Gap Between the Sign and the Value

Counterfeiting is the art of illusion. You’ve got the sign, all right—the dollar, the asset, the stock. You can print them by the truckload, flood the world with the symbol of wealth. But the value? It doesn’t materialize just because you’ve duplicated the sign. This is the gap, the rupture between the sign and what it’s supposed to represent. It’s not just about printing fake bills; the counterfeit runs deeper.

Look at financial services—aren’t they doing the same thing? They churn out new forms of money, securities, derivatives. They’re stacking signs upon signs, layers of abstraction that multiply like rabbits. But for all that multiplication, what’s being created? More signs, more indicators of wealth. Yet underneath it, there’s a hollow core—a failure to produce real value. This is counterfeiting in a suit and tie, wrapped in the language of economics.

Every time you trade a stock or bundle a loan, it’s another step removed from the ground. The asset becomes a symbol, then the symbol gets traded and turned into another symbol, and on it goes. Financial services turn the crank, generating signs of wealth without ever generating the wealth itself. It’s all valid, all legal, but it’s counterfeit in spirit. It’s the creation of something from nothing, without the labor or material that used to back those signs up.

And money—money isn’t just a tool of exchange. It’s a vote. Every dollar says what the economy will produce, where the resources will flow. You want red Ferraris? Then that’s what the economy will give you if you’ve got the signs to back it up. You want corn? Too bad if the guy with all the dollars wants something else. It’s not just currency; it’s a weaponized form of choice. The people holding the most signs get to dictate the landscape, what’s produced and what’s left to rot.

The real trick of the counterfeit economy is making us believe that it’s all real. That more signs mean more wealth, more value, more choice. But when the signs multiply and the value doesn’t? That’s when the gap widens, and we’re left chasing shadows, living in a world built on counterfeit choices.