Saturday, February 8, 2020
S&H Green Stamps and Seeds and Financialization Training
Back in the 70s, stores in the United States gave out "green stamps" like some credit cards give away frequent flyer miles or reward points today. You could purchase things like appliances and furniture with green stamps from a catalog. I just barely remember the little machines that dispensed the stamps at the local grocery store. Trading cards, like baseball cards or movie cards are another faux currency from my childhood.
Items like baseball cards and S&H stamps seem to trigger some hoarding instinct in people. Maybe it's some ancient mammalian instinct, like squirrels hoarding seeds and nuts, or packing a nest with leaves and insulation.
The finance concepts like savings and and usury are probably based on simple math models of agriculture. The seeds from one plant can result in 20 plants the next year, for example. In ancient egypt, there were state granaries. It's not hard to imagine that infrastructure creating an associated industry of "finance", so if you borrowed 10 bags of seeds, it makes sense you should pay back 11 bags at harvest time.
It's hard to formulate a plausible explanation of how money tokens, which are a symbolic approximation of actual things like seeds became much more "valued", at least in normal circumstances. Maybe in the very early days of making contracts, scarce, rare items like metal statues of local gods were used as collateral or as a seal for an agreement, and eventually that morphed into coins. The scarcity of those collateral items could serve as a sort of measure of the ability of some people to produce trade goods.
Finance and money tokens are one of the bases for the toy model version of reality--the false reality matrix that's ruled by the black sun and that's only visible with the third eye.
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