What is the purpose of currency? Why should it be based and backed by something?
Well consider this.
What is a thing that all of us are born with that we might trade with another person?
Time.
You will live only so many years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.
You can't take out a debt and have more time to live. Perhaps some technology may extend it. There are even things we have learned that extend it.
If not for things learned I would have died more than a decade ago. Does that mean I am living on borrowed time?
No. It means that investments of time by others in the past lead to ways to increase time for all of us. It means that some people learned in certain practices can SPEND their time to make sure people like you and I have more time.
Yet all of that still requires time. It is an investment in time. It is time spent by our predecessors.
What if you need my time, but I can't think of anything I want in exchange at the time you need it?
What then?
Perhaps we could come up with something you could give me to represent my time and maybe I can exchange it to someone else for something when I want it.
What would we call that?
Currency?
Money?
As long as it is backed by something (like my time) then it has value.
What if someone can come along and make as many of those tokens as they want?
Suddenly some people have representations of a lot of time without being backed by that actual time.
If people realize that and begin demanding larger amounts of those tokens in exchange what does that do to the people that still can only get tokens equivalent to their time?
This is exactly what INFLATION does.
Now money backed by something has been a strong and important argument for awhile. It has often been Gold, or other non-renewable resources that we decided have value.
Yet ultimately the most important backer for anything as far as I am concerned is TIME.
With that in mind we should realize that reality is not a safe space. We are not all born into equal circumstances. Some of us will have more time than others. That is not something to be viewed as a thing to WASTE your time dwelling upon. It is REALITY. Spend your time wisely. Spending it focused upon being a victim seems like an enormous waste.
Instead make the most of your time. Acknowledge reality. Do what you can with what you have.
