Honest Money? No Chance!

Listening to my radio I get the news:
small businesses started in great hope
are going bankrupt across my country
at rates unprecedented since the last crash,
debt default is burning through businesses.
High Street pessimism is hitting new highs.

Later a friend calls me and tells me how much
skilled tradesmen now prefer to work cash-in-hand
such that if they are asked to give a quote for a job
they will hedge and prevaricate until the customer 
says the magic words, 'off the books, cash only.'. 

What both of these stories confirm to me
is how debt should be indexed against dishonesty
of aspiration, but then in any such index
who speaks first about debt says it for all, ultimately.         
   

The Plastic Life

It is common to western societies to accept money
being lent with interest, it is as if advanced usury
was integral to The Enlightenment.
Just as easily accepted is seeing the currency reduced
to a plastic card with a code, as if the card defined
the social mobility. But each card is backed by a legal
agreement written in very small print.
Often this text is only available online, and its length
will be between 10,000 and 30,000 words.
The user has to sign to say they have read
and accepted the terms thereof.
Few read what they have signed up to,
in full or in part, and far fewer than that few learn
what those words mean, and appreciate
how the words offer less support to the customer
than they appear to.

The collected writings of St Paul clock in at about 30,000 words,
but even with all his tautologies and legally buttressed arguments
his summary of the plasticity of life that credit cards is brief-
'The love of money is the root of all evil'.
Because behind the love of money is the love of comfort,
and behind the comfort is our dis-ownership of the process
of how, materially, what we have comes to own us.
In our attempted dis -ownership of what we are owned by
lives our sloth, our incuriosity, our lack of integrity.