1. Since 99.99...% (practically all) of our moneyed transactions are based on debt, debt as a convention decreed into existence from nothing has become our reality. For the last great word on how we realise consciousness from the reality created by convention, see Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika (Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way). Debt bondage is what made Buddha come back to this plane of existence to extinguish all the promises he had made in all of his previous incarnations, and only then, could he move on as genuinely liberated. Socrates the Enlightened Master of Western philosophy startled all those at his hemlock induced death, by rising one last time to say, "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Please don't forget to pay the debt." I always tell young people to pay off their mortgages early to achieve partial financial freedom. Note how Obama would have more and more people enslaved by delaying their payments due. I'm sure he thinks he is doing the right thing which means I believe he is delusional but really what he is advocating is MORAL BANKRUPTCY.
2. Now bondage has a bit more impersonal and generalised meaning in this BOND-AGE. Fiat money is no more than the desires of civilisation through the BELIEF in writing on paper and electronic phosphorescence. It is both the greatest convenience since it is relatively costless and the greatest risk, since if it fails to be believed, it is worthless. Thus, money in the sense of fiat currency and as objects of belief may perhaps best be studied as a subject of SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY and/or as a matter of THEOLOGY. Many (most? all?) of the doctrines espoused by politicians, central bankers, investment bankers (i.e., high priests of the swirling academic neighbourhood gangs/thugs who advocate "war" for socio-economic salvation eg PAUL KRUGMAN or reparations of busted business cycles with moderate inflation to signal Americans out of DEPRESSION, such as BEN BERNANKE) cannot even begin to conceive of a world without fiat currency. Why? Because think of what would happen to the world if $600 trillion of derivatives based on fiats needed to be unwound. Maybe nothing returns. After all the equation is: Inconceivable Amount x Inconceivable Unwind = Inconceivable Whatever.
3. What's next? Personally, I keep on bugging my wife for us to buy a small farm with its own well. In any case, I liquidated all investment exposures to fiat back in 2006. There're Irish farmlands plus farm houses for about 70k EURO. "vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam" (The total of life's brevity forbids us clinging to long-off hope). Horace, Odes, I.4
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