"There are countless pop-cultural clichés about how banks, financial markets, or the government are purportedly conspiring to deprive us of our wealth"
It's simpler than that.
Suffice to ask ourselves a simple question, in a materialism - idealism dichotomy, does money belong to physical world or to the idea world.
The answer is obvious even without bringing up fractional reserve banking.
So, if you are using GTA money why public debt even exists??
You already know that Harrari in "Sapiens" put it even more succinctly, the fact that we exchange our labour for ideas is nothing short of exemplification of group imagination.
"There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no
money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common
imagination of human beings."
Harrari.
Yes, despite all the advances in science and tech, as a species, we are still very much mythological creatures.
For a somewhat different take, I recommend Sydney Homer's landmark classic "A History of Interest Rates", which despite the dry title, is a fantastic read. For example, Homer begins with capital, namely cattle. Cattle gives birth to other cattle, over time.They can be lent out to farmers. Much of our language for capital (head) comes from terms involving cattle. Thus there is an inherent interest rate embedded in livestock, completely apart from social obligations, but deriving from opportunity cost and the time nature requires for an animal to grow. This would be the natural value origin of money and interest, in cattle country regions of ancient Egypt and the Levant.
Alternately we can say that this begins with wheat and agriculture. As soon as there is an agricultural surplus, the government starts collecting surplus wheat and storing it in a central temple, where temple workers can be fed. Then a natural unit of value is a measure of weight, to signify how much wheat is weighed out on a scale when it is brought into the temple to pay tax. This is the tax origin of money, in Ancient Mesopotamia.
There is also the mercantilist account, in which gold is used to trade with foreigners, whom are not trusted to repay social obligations. Gold can be assayed with touchstones, discovered in the third millennium B.C., used in India and Greece. Then weight of gold would be the unit of account, long predating the invention of coinage to pay mercenaries in Greece, and due to its usefulness in settling foreign trade, it becomes a natural store of value, measured by weight.
Finally we can talk about generic social obligations, and get to a Debt origin of money as Graeber does.
All these can work together - capitalist, statist, socialists, mercantilists can all have their own history of money. I wouldn't privilege one over another and think they all coexisted. For example in the book of Genesis, Abraham buys a burial plot from a foreign tribe in exchange for pieces of gold, and then Jacob works off a debt from his relative Laban that was incurred by receiving Laban's daughters, and a dispute is resolved by the payment of sheep.
Another great book for modern financial history is Bagehot's "Lombard Street".
"There are countless pop-cultural clichés about how banks, financial markets, or the government are purportedly conspiring to deprive us of our wealth"
It's simpler than that.
Suffice to ask ourselves a simple question, in a materialism - idealism dichotomy, does money belong to physical world or to the idea world.
The answer is obvious even without bringing up fractional reserve banking.
So, if you are using GTA money why public debt even exists??
You already know that Harrari in "Sapiens" put it even more succinctly, the fact that we exchange our labour for ideas is nothing short of exemplification of group imagination.
"There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no
money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common
imagination of human beings."
Harrari.
Yes, despite all the advances in science and tech, as a species, we are still very much mythological creatures.
For a somewhat different take, I recommend Sydney Homer's landmark classic "A History of Interest Rates", which despite the dry title, is a fantastic read. For example, Homer begins with capital, namely cattle. Cattle gives birth to other cattle, over time.They can be lent out to farmers. Much of our language for capital (head) comes from terms involving cattle. Thus there is an inherent interest rate embedded in livestock, completely apart from social obligations, but deriving from opportunity cost and the time nature requires for an animal to grow. This would be the natural value origin of money and interest, in cattle country regions of ancient Egypt and the Levant.
Alternately we can say that this begins with wheat and agriculture. As soon as there is an agricultural surplus, the government starts collecting surplus wheat and storing it in a central temple, where temple workers can be fed. Then a natural unit of value is a measure of weight, to signify how much wheat is weighed out on a scale when it is brought into the temple to pay tax. This is the tax origin of money, in Ancient Mesopotamia.
There is also the mercantilist account, in which gold is used to trade with foreigners, whom are not trusted to repay social obligations. Gold can be assayed with touchstones, discovered in the third millennium B.C., used in India and Greece. Then weight of gold would be the unit of account, long predating the invention of coinage to pay mercenaries in Greece, and due to its usefulness in settling foreign trade, it becomes a natural store of value, measured by weight.
Finally we can talk about generic social obligations, and get to a Debt origin of money as Graeber does.
All these can work together - capitalist, statist, socialists, mercantilists can all have their own history of money. I wouldn't privilege one over another and think they all coexisted. For example in the book of Genesis, Abraham buys a burial plot from a foreign tribe in exchange for pieces of gold, and then Jacob works off a debt from his relative Laban that was incurred by receiving Laban's daughters, and a dispute is resolved by the payment of sheep.
Another great book for modern financial history is Bagehot's "Lombard Street".