The promises and the currency are not fictional: they still represent resources and flow of resources. Unfortunately, the promises are now multiplied with debts (promises to extract and use resources in the future and to force our future self to work so we can have fun in the present). Relatively benign on a personal level, but when the government has to encourage inflation and growth of an economy in order to pay its debts, the resultant effect is the inverse of the tax rate (to create $100 of tax payments at a 25% rate, the government has to ‘incentivize’ $400 of taxable income, trickling down from thousands of dollars of corporate activities and tax-deductible brainwashing (marketing is theft of our time and attention).
Competition is a first-in, first-win game. That's why they protect 'intellectual property' so dearly and also why they protect competition at all costs, claim that people make ‘choices’ but behind closed doors tell corporate clients that they can ‘capture demographics’ (coerce people to buy things).
Bullies have always been favored and elected by people. Chickens do it, too. The first rooster to grow his feathers becomes the king, and any late arrivals to puberty get pecked down to size (feathers are pecked out by the other chickens if the king rooster doesn't kill the weaker ones).
Unless we cage the money roosters (bankers) and keep them away from the flock (Glass-Steagal Act), they maintain their bossiness and get first peck at every..single..thing. That’s why democracies build scary “big government” that capitalist sycophants and wage slaves blindly fight against (see “marketing” above). Sometimes it backfires (401K plans replacing corporate pensions enriched corporations at both ends: increased investment money and reduced debt loads).
The answer? Keeping resources close to the land and paying people to care for them for future people.
UBI based on sales taxes.
The rich get richer because the poor work for them to buy their crappy stuff at "always low prices" which aren't really that low; we just pay out of our paychecks and our grandchildren get stuck with the tax bills from deficit spending.
In the end, the money that's being created is done so by promising to extract resources from at least 5 more planets that we don't actually have, and mostly in order to inflate the egos of a bunch of billionaires.
With all of that said, the money on the stock market really is just air in the long term because the 5 planets don’t exist. It’s people betting on the competitive moral turpitude of groups of men (corporations) who have sworn moral allegience to piles of money, on the blind belief that demand creates physical and social resources.
