“Hi everyone, my name is Bonnie and an interesting thing about me is I think that money is the most evil thing in the world.”
That’s a real statement that a fellow graphic design student of mine gave during our introductory class session way back in 2015. It’s also, quite literally, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard a person say.
I’m not surprised by the opinion though, since Bonnie’s mother was an LA City council member, staunch Democrat, and Bernie supporter. The classic, well-off hypocritical pro-socialist mentality. Exactly the kind of person who thinks that the economy is about money, and that the free market is therefor a sin. This statement has stuck with me for years because, although it’s a common perspective among dumb people, I had never heard someone announce the opinion in such a blunt way.
Having studied economics in turn, and finding it to be a very deep philosophical experience, I’m here to correct that opinion by clarifying what exactly economics is, in three bite-sized installations:
Part 1: It’s not about money. It’s about choice.
Part 2: Money is the economic lubricant, not the engine.
Part 3: Morality is fueled by markets.
Even though we often think about the economy with monetary concepts on our mind — such as GDP, stock indexes, inflation, national debt, etc. — the reality is that we could measure any of these things in non-monetary terms. Moreover, the assumption that the economy is happening at the level of these large-scale metrics is wrong. The economy is a pervasive ecosystem that operates at a local, even personal level. The technical definition of economics doesn’t mention money at all: the study of how and why people make the choices they do in the face of scarcity.
When you go to a store, what is a shopkeeper or employee more likely to ask you: “Sir, do you have enough money to buy what you need?” or “Sir, did you find what you were looking for?” It’s always the second question, and that reveals the truth about what an economy really is. An economy is a joint effort to find and provide for one another the things we want or need in a mutually-beneficial way. You give me something I need more than you do, and in return I’ll give you something you need more than I do. Maybe that’s in the form of money, but oftentimes it isn’t.
So you can clearly see that the economy is acting whenever a neighbor borrows an ingredient and repays it in turn. This is voluntary exchange. When Tim Walz said that one man’s neighborliness is another’s socialism, he betrayed the common ignorance of socialists about what makes an economy. They refuse to see that an economy is the millions of daily, voluntary decisions that people make to exchange service of one kind with repayment in another.
You cannot compel people to serve one another’s interests — even by saying it’s for the common good. Socialists demand that we share everything unconditionally, but true sharing demands a two-way transaction with conditions in order to be a sustainable system. Hence, economies run on exchange — the kind of exchange where the answer to “Why should I do that?” is never answered with “Because I said so.”
Misunderstanding this phenomenon, socialists like Bonnie and Walz tend to blame money (or the want of money) as if it has corrupted a pure human instinct. I should have asked Bonnie, “If money is so evil, why are socialists obsessed with redistributing wealth?” If money is the root of evil, then surely spreading it around is spreading the evil too. It is the socialists who misunderstand a natural dynamic: the economy is not driven by greedy people aiming to accumulate money, but by the average person looking to satisfy their needs in a world of competing interests. Satisfying one’s needs without harming others cannot be called ‘evil.’
All ecosystems need freedom to grow, shift, and flex if they are to survive. For the economy, that core freedom is driven not by money, but by individual freedom to choose and to exchange. So if we return to our shopkeeper’s question, “Did you find what you were looking for?” it turns out that you can read this in a different light: “Did I provide what you needed?” It’s not really asking how you are doing, it’s asking how have I done for you. It is an expressed desire to continue or better achieve a beneficial relationship that is agnostic about money — and it happens at a personal, not theoretical, level. That’s the essence of an economy.