Trade: As old as humankind

       Lewis Lapham, ed. Lapham’s Quarterly XII:2, TRADE (2019) The usual nicely done collection of unconsidered trifles adding up to an overview of the theme topic, with a perhaps surprisingly coherent insight made up of many bits and pieces.
     Humankind is a trading animal. Other creatures share food and prey, and some demonstrate a well-developed sense of fairness. But only humans have built systems to exchange goods and services within and between groups. Money, understood as tokens of value functioning like IOUs, appears very early, along with the confusion between ascribed and intrinsic value. The earliest examples of money are all precious objects and materials, desirable on their own account. Thus the confusion between wealth and a positive cash balance, which has skewed economic systems ever since.
     The connection and conflict between trading and politics is also very old. The earliest law-codes include rules regulating trade and (usually brutal) punishment for cheats. The desire for profit is tied up with the desire for power. Merchants, with their focus on cash instead of goods, have suffered suspicion from the earliest times. Kings have used merchants to amass wealth, all the while despising the people who did the mundane work of trading.
     Trade is of course the essence of modern economies. From about Renaissance times on, the accumulation of profit, the techniques of accurate bookkeeping, and the customs and laws of enforceable contracts have accelerated the development of technologies hard and soft, and have brought us to the present impasse: An economy built on the twin pillars of ever-increasing consumption and ever-increasing profit. Profit has ceased to be the well-earned income of the trader and has become an end in itself. As such, it’s become a tax on the economy as a whole, which can be paid only by expanding production and consumption. This will not end well. ***