It seems you post in these boards much more than you read and learn from them.
All these financial instruments, all these high profits, were only possible due the
artificial creation of credit through money supply inflation. Please, study how
business cycles are formed.
I don't know, i don't see a lot of berries in the real world.
One main difference between berries and our current world economy is that we value information.
Information is pretty renewable so you don't need to wait for the berries to grow.
An information economy completely destroys the berry example as knowledge does not become consumed and yet is tradeable.
So there is a lot of 'stuff' in our economy that cannot be consumed away and yet requires money to be traded.
We need new financial room to exchange ideas because we value ideas in terms of money.
In essence, you need to redistribute your berries so that these new informational goods also are covered.
You have two options. Either you take a certain percentage of everyones berries and allocate it to the new dynamics in your economy, or you bring more berreis into circulation that you allocate to the new dynamic.
Our economy is at this time so very much more complex than your berry example that there is just no way you can start to compare the two. You cannot have the ammount of economical interactions without an abstracted buffer (we call it credit).
What if crusoe didn't just have a berry bush but also a cage with writers? Painters? Software architects?
Would he even be able to count his berries without also feeding his mathematicians? Who would have taught him to count if there were no mathematicians (that need a daily dose of berries) that devoted their lifes to discovering the magic of numbers?
So to facilitate all these processes you need to pump money through the veins of society. You need to redistribute your berries so you can reap the benefits of the mathematician helping you lose less berreis due to inefficiency. In the end you gain berries because you can use them more efficently.
And you get most of it back through stuff like taxes. You can issue 100 berry credits to the mathematician and you know he will consume only 10 real berries. The mathematician will use 90 berries to distribute his latest ideas (this is a requirement of you to give him the berries) and everyone who consumes berries in this society will be able to save 5% of their berries due to more efficient processing. You then ask for 85 berries back from the mathematician (in taxes or as payback on a loan) and altho you lost 5 berries your whole economy just got upgraded and you have to produce 5% less berries (or enoy them for 5 more percent) to feed this system. To get this 5% saving you will need to have 100 berries. But since you don't, and you never plan on actually consuming them, they can be replaced by tokenberries.
So you invent tokenberries.
By inventing tokenberries you have made your long term real-berry expenses less by 5%!
So there are actual real reasons why we have these credit systems.
But we agree that they are sick at the moment.
I think that is entirely due to human greed.
There is no situation thinkable (with or without credit) where a more powerfull group will not try to somehow abuse a less powerfull group. This has absolutely nothing to do with credit or governments. It has to do with how our brains operate.
In any situation, in any system there will be people driven to have it better than others.
Any system you can think of can and will be abused, be it social, financial or technological.
The financial instruments are not the problem, the way they are used by fellow humans is the actual problem.
Untill we can find a way to
properly control the entities that create the life around us we have no hope of changing this as we will be exchanging one 'evil' for another, but random, new soon to be evil.
No ammount of discussion about the pro's and cons of credit will change our human nature.
