Toady locked my Mars Politics Thread because he thought it was spam.
IT WAS A JOKE! I WAS PARODYING THE OTHER POLITICS THREADS.
Anyway:
It's the Same Basic idea as currency.
It's just a game, but the world doesn't want us to realize that, because if everyone knew it was just a game, then the spell would be broken.
It used to be that the most expensive item in the world was gold. Then somehow it became promises on paper. And now it's digitized. Stocks are probably the biggest marketable good, and they have no scarcity beyond what the owner says, because I'm reality they're intangible.
And yet we all play the game because we think we might be the ones who'll win, when in reality the biggest winners are the ones who are running it, and know it's a game.
Authority has many similarities.
Well technically we still use gold. Its just that dollars and euros and etc. all represent a set portion of the gold in a country. So if there were only 100 dollars in the US, having 1 dollar would mean you own 10% of the gold in the Federal Reserve. Since there are a fuckhueg amount of dollars in the US, having 1 dollar means you can haz cheeseburger.
But only a little one. That probably isn't using actual beef.
This is how inflation works.
Stocks and such even FURTHER confuse the utter retardation of this system in that they give you a portion of the portion of the portions of a company that has a certain amount of portions.
So yes, you are 100% correct that its all pretty much bullshit. It kinda STARTED as necessary, but its gotten so befuddled in crap that its just lost meaning at this point.