What Aristotle thought it meant to be truly wealthy

Most people don't really want to be wealthy so they can fly in private jets and wear bling, they want freedom from the daily grind and stress of wondering if one false move in life will see them lose everything.

> “Being wealthy consists in using things rather than in possessing them; for it is the activity and use of such things that makes up wealth.”

I will try to remember this when the next cool development board entices me to order it.

This is why so many spiritual traditions consider usury a sin and prohibit it. It perverts the incentives away from win-win.

>But when people start to hoard or collect money for the money’s sake, then it creeps into the unnatural. There is no identifiable purpose to wealth acquisition. There is no final telos to the golden face of greed. Money, as with numbers, has no end point — you just have to get more and more of it.

Proudhon, Silvio Gesell and Keynes have discovered that money is superior over any potential good or service in the real world because money acts like a joker, you can simply trade it in for that service exactly when you need it. This means if people don't know what they want to do, they simply freeze up and never make any decision, they wait until they have no other choice than to spend their money. Being able to deal with any potential situation by being able to make decisions that are decoupled from space and time is valuable in itself, this superiority never disappears and therefore the desire to save money "just in case I need it" never disappears. Keynes calls this concept liquidity preference.

This is quite important to know, it means there is an interest rate floor below which people refuse to lend their money. After all, lending money means committing yourself to a decision, you are giving up liquidity, i.e. the ability to deal with any potential situation.

People store and hoard other things in the real economy but those things have a cost associated with storing they money is explicitly costless, actually storing cash isn't costless but digital cash is almost costless.

It is basically free insurance provided by the rest of society so people who are seeking safety just keep accumulating more and more even if they never intend to use it just so they can feel safe.

In an economy that barely experiences growth but always has positive interest rates lending money appears to be quite evil, every loan is effectively a payday loan. No wonder they banned interest, the obvious problem is that it is just treating symptoms. Banning interest doesn't eliminate liquidity preference so people just pile up more money and trading stagnates because most money is being saved rather than spent.