Suppression, Monopoly and Media of Payment

While the concept of media of payment, closely related to the willingness to accept them, starts to develop, the basics of how to exploit it to suppress start to develop as well.

Five centuries Before Christ, in his famous speech, Roman politician Menenius Lanatus Agrippa compared society to a human body, in order to highlight how just as a body survives only as long as its organs cooperate, society too survives only as long as the individuals in it cooperate.

This comparison holds true for exchange, too: products exchanged flow between people providing them survival just like blood circulates to provide all the cells with oxygen and nourishment, so both each individual or cell can go on contributing to the general survival with its specialized product.

Monopoly enters this scene with its factors of power, scarcity and suppression: When an individual wants power over his fellows, whatever use he/she wants to do of that power, as to society it can be summed up in either help or suppression. Now, one can observe how power is based on scarcity: exercising power means controlling, and if done to the detriment of the controlled means dominating; domination is exercised by a means, and the means is as effective as there's some kind of scarcity, and the scarcity is based on want. Example: if you did not want to live, or if you had infinite life, and someone threatened you with a weapon to rob you, where would you tell him to shove his weapon up? Example: if someone tried to dominate you by force, and you had unlimited force, where would you shove his force up? As one can observe that scarcity is more or less suppressive anyhow, therefore someone willing to dominate you will have a suppressive effect over you anyhow. The scarcity of food, energy, houses, transports, etc. is a problem. But when you live in a civilisation where there is abundance of the means to produce those things, the fact that somehow they end up being scarce for most of the people stinks particularly badly of suppression, isn’t it?

Suppression, Monopoly and Media of Payment, 2

We can put it another way, too: it has been said that a typical suppressive strategy is that of getting a hold on a vital line in an organization and the power to obstruct its flow, and then exploit it: the flow is vital, so the organization will be willing to give something in exchange for the relief of the obstruction. Monopoly and oligopoly do just that, isn’t it? We can also use an old word for it: blackmail. Example: addiction traders, soul slave masters whether they’re within or outside the law, they induce the individual into thinking he is incomplete without the addiction, then profit from selling him what he now thinks he can’t do without, while the truth is that addiction just pretends to give but a little of what it has robbed in the first place. Example: those who undermine the water main so they can sell you dearly bottled water.

It is more than obvious that such a mean exploitation of an obstructed vital line has to rightfully explode in the monopolist’s face so that the society regains what was its own in the first place and the monopolist pays for his or her crimes. Only, it takes enough honest, informed and willing individuals to do so.

Survival is economics, economics is production and exchange, media of payment are vital for exchange as blood for the body, and the monopoly/oligopoly discussed here targets just this very basic vital line.

The more you will know about how it works exactly, the more you will be able to evaluate its impact on the whole society, and the amount of cover and silence about it as well.

How does a monopoly/oligopoly on media of payment get built?