Nobody Owns Money

There is a wonderful scene in The Wire, where Omar crashes a poker game and holds a gun on the high roller drug lords around the table as his partner scoops up the cash from the table.
One of the drug lords says, "That's my money you're taking."
Omar, smiling corrects him, "You don't own money. You just get to use it for a while. Nobody owns money."
Omar, of course, has no more than a high school education, but he understands something today's pundits do not seem to appreciate. (Of course, Omar is really David Simon & Co.) What he (they) are saying is that money, cash, is a creation of the government and of society, it's a medium of exchange, no one person owns it.

In another scene, Ziggy lights up a $100 bill in a bar and the longshoremen react as if he has destroyed something which belongs to them, and he has. Ziggy doesn't own that bill, the whole country does.

Consider a Van Gogh painting. Any Van Gogh. I love Van Gogh. One of his paintings now sells for $20 million dollars. You can buy a huge mansion in the Hamptons for $20 million. Think of all those stone masons, all those electricians, plumbers, construction workers, painters, gardeners, landscapers who worked to create that mansion. Van Gogh painted that painted in three days.

Or think of giving Albert Pulhous, a baseball player, $250 million dollars. Now, you can say, he is paid what the market says he's worth. He can fill baseball stadiums. If a stadium of 50,000 fans pays an average of $20 a ticket, he brings in $2 million days that one day. And there are 80 home games, so thats $160 million. But, the fact is, he does not bring in that much money. He is playing with other players. Nobody can say he fills stadiums. Nobody will come to the stadium even if he hits a home run every third time at bat, if his team is in last place.

What am I saying?

I'm saying we all have a stake in the use of money. If a dimwit burns a $100 bill at the bar, it diminishes the value of the $100 bill I just earned by working an hour. If a painter or a painting's owner can get $20 million for a painting, it diminishes the value of the work of all those workers who built the $20 million dollar mansion. Individuals can damage the value of something we all own collectively.

And they shouldn't be able to do this.

But, how, practically to put my value into practice?

I'd say, if I were the dictator in this plutocracy/monocracy we have, I'd insist that for any contract over $1 million dollar some bureaucrat ought to pass judgment on whether or not the guy getting the money is entitled to it. Or something like that.

We need a balancing mechanism.

I'm still a little fuzzy on the details of how to practically achieve that. But I go the principle pretty well worked out.