That is why reductionist science seems to rob the world of its sacredness, since everything becomes one or another combination of a handful of generic building blocks.

Beyond the meeting of immediate needs, you can see from this description the power of time banks to restore community. They generate the kind of economic and social resiliency that sustains life in times of turmoil. As money unravels, it is important to have alternative structures for the meeting of human needs.

These policies are redistributive because while the taxes fall disproportionately on the wealthy, the expenditures and programs benefit all equally, or even favor the poor. They counteract the natural tendency toward the concentration of wealth in an interest-based system.

It is only when high income translates into accumulation, frivolous consumption, or socially destructive consumption that it makes sense to restrict it. In other words, the problem is not with high income; it is with the results of the income getting stuck at some point in its circulation, accumulating and stagnating.

In other words, you, dear reader, would love to maximize your utility by spending all your money right now, but are induced not to because you know that you’ll be able to have even more later, thanks to interest. This is known in economics as the time preference postulate.

The story of backing can be used to limit and guide the creation of money. Today, we limit that right to banks and guide it by the profit motive—money goes to those who will make more of it.

not just “goods now for goods in the future,” but goods now for more goods in the future.

Money is a system of social agreements, meanings, and symbols that develops over time.

We have gotten so used to the world of usury-money that we mistake many of its effects for basic laws of economics or human nature.