Work creates money. Not banks.

Work creates value, banks create money to represent the value. Money isn't value, it's a (n occasionally wrong) map of it.

And some work creates negative value! :)

If environmental costs are included, it might be more than “some”, such is the structure of the economy.

Even without externalities there is plenty of work that isa net negative in the macroeconomic sense.

If I pay someone to espouse the glories of ignorance, sow division and shill terrible policy online (not that many among us don't do it for free regardless) that work is of negative value to the broader economy despite having scant if any externality. But, that work is of positive value in the microeconomic sense hence why someone would get paid to do it. There are lots of niches like this in the economy.

See related: Broken windows fallacy and bullshit jobs.

If you add to this that the value of "money" is backed by violence and you see that without energy to back that violence there can be no markets; then you will be able to imagine where this is heading at very fast velocity!

Nature does not negotiate.

  - Own you time! Don't sell your time.
  - Sell your past, not your present/future.
  - Only work with software. Hardware is done permanently.
  - Lower the energy requirements until it hurts.
  - Make permanent solutions.
  - Stop moving faster than 20 km/h, if you do take a train.
  - Live small, so you can heat it for less.
  - If you are in debt: SELL!

Well said. It's a distorted representation of value. The monetary system is not an even playing field, some people earn the more money than others whilst providing less value; even negative value. Those who spend other people's money right out of a money printer don't hold onto it anywhere near as tightly as those who had to work hard to earn it from other people whom themselves also worked hard.

I think this is a confusing/misleading way to frame it.

Instead of saying: > some people earn more money than others whilst providing less value; even negative value

It's more precise to say: > some entities (people, companies, ...) give money to some people whilst those people provide less value than others

This turns the passive language (receiving) into active language (giving) which requires a subject. Now immediately a question appears: why would the subject do that if they receive comparably little value?

In other words, this doesn't really have to do much with the monetary system at all. The same would be true without any money.

The difference is that if somebody or an institution earned their money fair and square, then they are entitled to give it to anyone they want. The problem is that the monetary system itself creates the inequality via artificial means (which falls on the shoulders of taxpayers and citizens via inflation) which means that big institutions did not earn much of the money that they're giving out; it was handed out to them through money printing. It's a systemic issue.

Just to be clear, I'm not disagreeing with the point you are making now, but it's clearly different from your original post which was all about "creating value".

You exchange work for money.

Source:

https://web.archive.org/web/20141028071303/http://www.bankof...

It doesn't have to be that way. People could have accounts with the central bank and it could credit their accounts directly, and the banking regulator could mandate 100% reserve requirements so that banks themselves couldn't create more money.

Unless there's a limit on how much can be put into the central bank account this would have an extremely severe impact during a financial crisis.

The central bank account would be safer than government bonds, meaning in a flight to safety interest rates on government debt would rise as money drained to the safer central bank account. Exactly the opposite of what you want when you may need government to act urgently and expansively to solve whatever problem has occurred and likely only the elected government has the authority to solve that problem.

The central bank would have very low interest rates for deposits. It's not even a farfetched idea. Central bank digital currency is exactly this concept implemented in a general way

Interest rates have no bearing on the issue I raised. During a financial crisis (2008) people don't care about interest rates they care about the safety of their capital.