How love transmuted into lucre

The rulers of these states needed money to expand. They thus extended the little irrigation ditches the women had used for their small gardens into canal systems and cut or burnt surrounding forests away to tax farmers - and, indirectly, the rest of the population for food and water. Clearing the land also made it easier to enslave surrounding tribes. That is how the Gobi and Sahara deserts began. It had nothing to do with CO₂'s greenhouse effect.

Women and water ceased to be the main supports of money creation monopolies when states started to issue standardized coins. These made it possible for tradesmen and investors to calculate profits in advance, and for states to organise public services, efficiently. Civilizations around the Mediterranean, where the system was invented c. 550BC, flourished as they had not before. They were also able to wage war on a scale, and with weapons and tactics, that enabled them to assemble Empires from what had been non-monetary tribes. These Empires grew as long as their inhabitants had faith in their governments and the value of their money; they collapsed when their populations realized that their governments were cheating them by issuing ever more, ever more worthless money.

Empires are still taxation-protection rackets when the face value of the coins issued by their treasuries is larger than that of their metal content. The new money must be worth less than that already in circulation, also because coins whose metal content is greater than their face value are melted down. New money is required to keep the taxation pump going - but that creates inflation. It is not possible to create a healthy, happy, harmonious social order by cheating. Empires collapse when their citizens realize the extent to which they were exploited when they gave real goods, rights or services in exchange for ever more worthless bits of metal. A system of 'justice' that is paid for by taxes and depends on the cheating of money creation is inevitably unjust. The system works on "Do as a say, not as I do. If I cheat, kill, torture, tell lies, spy on you.. that is all for the public good". It is not. Repressive order implies death. A constrained peace and mechanical order can be imposed over limited areas and periods of time. But, as hatred accumulates and creativity is stifled, society crumbles in internal or external war, or it loses its will to live.

When the ice age ended, the earth's total human population was probably a few tens of millions. Though empires rose and fell since then, the size and complexity of our organizations has been increasing. Hunter-gatherer tribes grew as they settled into villages and developed writing and mathematics, stone buildings and sailing boats, the wheel and roads, metal tools and weapons. These inventions helped populations to increase - and deserts to expand.