Warp wrote:
>   At its core, capitalism is about free commerce, and it's precisely free
> commerce which keeps the cash flowing.

The current economic crisis in America is caused precisely by capitalism 
applied to that which isn't capital. The money here isn't real money. 
There's no "cash" flowing. All money is created as debt. When you go to the 
bank with your house or business (which is actual *capital*), you get money 
by taking out a loan based on a note, usually with a mortgage[1] attached.

However, the money the bank gives to you is also a loan. So what they hand 
you is a note, in particular, a Federal Reserve Note. You go to the bank, 
and they say "I'll promise to pay you some money in the near future if you 
promise to pay me more money in the more distant future."

Capitalism works well when restricted to capital. When you start calling 
notes, derivatives, options, and insurance policies "capital" you start 
getting into a crisis. The accounting books said the money that was owed 
back to the banks was some thousands of times the GDP of the entire world 
combined. That isn't capital. There's nothing real and of value you can 
create with those numbers. You can't rent it out, or build a car with it. 
The hundreds of billions of dollars of "money" being given to the banks 
isn't "real" either, which is why we're not seeing tremendous price 
inflation in spite of huge amounts of money supply inflation.

If money isn't subject to capitalism, then you get things like this economic 
crisis and the 1929 depression. When different banks issue their own money 
competitively, then banks with bad business practices and which take risks 
too large don't get many customers, so their failure is not more problematic 
than one stock tanking.



[1] - Loan = "bank promises to give money to whoever you write a check to". 
Mortgage = "You give the bank your house if you don't pay back the loan as 
specified in the note."  Note = "We promise to give you money in the future."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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