A friend sent notice by tagging me in a Facebook post. In a sense, she was reaching out beyond the space and time that separates us. We do this so effortlessly and frequently that we take it for granted.
But what she sent me was an art historian's short statement of the value of patience, reading a painting, feedback on art... Buried in all the black and white of the page was something else about coins as tools for "transmitting value through space and time in the most stable possible way."
Well, o.k., let's forgive the art historian a reductive economic perspective (you can read more of that here if that's your thing); let's just say that a "currency" such as Bitcoin is making it apparent that our more traditional coinage has always been as much about political and social control, the ability to track, tax, limit, fine and fee... as it has been providing a stable value. What remains insightful or useful beyond art history is the primacy and prescient need of "value." E.g., producing energy is one thing; saving energy, having the ability to use it when and where you want it... these and other economic values (e.g., transmission, selling...) are actual values or dependencies that give value to energy. I.e., if you can't sufficiently transcend space and time with these values in tact, the value of energy is greatly reduced if not entirely lost. Let's call these characteristics, or Accidents, value dependencies.
It seems that these value dependencies are in some industries more or less easily calculated -- e.g., by electrical engineers -- and also easily commoditized and assigned an economic value. But other endeavors of human activity and especially of the mind are not so easily valued. E.g., how much "value" should or can we assign to a math lesson, or a well written essay in philosophy? Oscar Wilde quipped that the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But I'd hazzard to guess than even so clever a man as Mr. Wilde would struggle with our economic affairs.
But what if we could agree to Accidents and value dependencies of other human activity, we might be able to ascribe to them a Bitcoin-esque currency or trade that suggests the potentials for value that transcends time and space and thereby further reduce our dependency upon traditional coinage or currency that currently rewards a very small cross-section of human activity or what is easily commoditized for the economies of power elites.
I'm not advocating some socialist collective or result of a dialectical process. People would have to work, compete... construct economic value. But there would be work that allows for an industry to improve the roads aesthetically as much as their quality of surface condition and efficiency. For all we know, people might pay tolls for pleasure (like the famous 17 mile stretch near Carmel). In effect, the rich do. But in a time of tremendous labor surplus, it seems that the poor shouldn't be poor when they could be -- if proper efficient commodity exchanges allowed -- rewarded for contributing constructively to their environs or others who would see wealth developing in new expressions.
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