Many people who do not care about money as a main goal believe that economics of any sort has little to do with them. Or, they feel that economics does not describe what they care about at all. Some rarely think about economic concerns in the first place; money occurs to them as an issue only when it becomes an obvious concern, or in some other way passes right in front of their face. Exceedingly prevalent, and dangerous, is the idea that they should not care about economic freedom and do not need to, since they have no obsession with making lots of money. As 'little people' in economic terms, many expect advantages from redistribution of wealth taxed from those who make the most money, or have the most money.

And most economists, who naturally care about money very much, are generally not able to identify with these other perspectives enough to effectively dissuade people from those beliefs, even free-market economists.

One mistake has been to limit the discussion of free enterprise to the financial and the physical. Capitalism would seem to be about financial capital — the physical manifestations of it, currency and resources and possessions which convert to currency, and the exchange of this capital. This is only the roughest and most closed understanding of capitalism. Unfortunately it is a popular one, especially among rulers, and one prevalent among critics of free markets.

There is much more, or can be much more, to capitalism than money. To understand how and why, it is necessary to reintroduce ourselves to money.

Money or currency is a medium of exchange which is supposed to represent value. Governments now manufacture money by printing or coining official currency. Of course, to get us to care about official currency in the first place, governments bridged from precious metal. Computerized credit now represents paper money and coinage. Paper money originally represented gold when there was a gold standard and coins were precious metal. Long before this, gold, and originally silver became standards because they were rare and durable, malleable into coins, and had useful value on their own as commodities. Far from being an original product of central government, money was a commodity adopted for exchange. The most marketable commodity tends to become the standard known as money in a given context or culture. In various places and times, people have used cowry shells, beads, barley, lead, copper, or clay tokens, sometimes different clay tokens for different commodities. And originally, there was no symbolic money — there was only the inefficiency of direct bartering.

For streamlining transactions, representations of money may be used which are worthless in themselves without solid reference to the commodity which has been accepted as money, until that representation is accepted as a commodity of exchange in itself. The electronic credit which represents cash today is worthless without that connection. However, paper money no longer requires a direct link to gold, because there is a belief in its validity as a standard. The evolution of that belief has had much to do with the intrusion of government into money and exchange.

Besides making trade and exchange easier, the invention of money also made taxation easier. As soon as a standard naturally evolved as a more efficient means of exchange than barter, the taxation also became more efficient. Instead of a percentage of the harvest or the herd, rulers could appropriate money. For some centuries, decentralized and unofficial money actually existed side-by-side with government, and official taxation.

Then, although money had begun as an evolving standard to represent value (whatever worked well), rulers discovered that by centralizing money, issuing official, enforced, and regulated currency, they gained an unprecedented level of control over exchanges within society. Through this monopoly over value when it is exchanged, governments acquired the means to interfere in the exchange of value, to appropriate value, and to simulate the original creation of value by creating for itself more of the means of exchange. Even more far-reaching was the interference of this 'objective value' in the definition of value itself. Official money has become official value.

Control of money has become control of value, thereby culturally fostering a falsely objective value. Public policy-makers always care about centrally-minted legal money (printing it does fuel governments, after all). We often get the feeling that we are all supposed to care about it, even if we are not disposed to a great interest in trading or business, even if money would serve us best as a means, and not a standard of value. In the hands of a central authority, money has become a prime influence of social control, in addition to being a useful tool.

Governments now manufacture money by printing or coining it. But governments produce what stands for value; they do not produce value in itself. Governments try to set objective monetary values and manipulate them, but all conceptions of value are subjective, as the products of different individual minds. The idea of objective value is artificial. It depends on external control of what we believe and what we use. That is why in a Promethean society, a free society, there must be no official currency. Decentralization of currency is the foundation of a truly free economy, in a truly free society. Any standard which can be agreed upon as a means of exchange for any given transaction, is a valid one. Who can say what shared standard or standards will be found when there is no interference with choices? Perhaps more than one kind of currency will work better than just one. Perhaps gold will again be standard, except with multiple independent standards for its verification. We do not know, because force has been used for thousands of years now to control a monopoly on currency.

A decentralized, individual understanding of capital is just as important. Anything which can be exchanged, or converted to a form which can be exchanged, can be considered capital. But so can anything which has value for one individual, yet others would not accept in any exchange, at least in its current form. Plenty of experiences, knowledge, beliefs, and other thoughts have value only to the person who possesses them. In intangible ways, perhaps these contribute to capital others would care about — or perhaps not. However, to the individual who does care, they do have value. Now, externally or 'objectively' that is not monetary value. But that is not necessarily important to a person, nor should it be, if their idea of profit is something else in a given context. An individual understanding and assignation of value allows for this. This is a major reason why an individually free economy may be said to be most essential to those whose chief interests are not financial; only when the identity of value and capital are freely determined individually, and this freedom is recognized, are other personal interests besides the financial definitely allowed to be a factor to the extent that they matter to a person, such as artistic creativity, family, privacy, abstract thinking, recreation, etc.

The point of Promethean capitalism is the freedom to define one's goals subjectively, as one desires, and the freedom to pursue them.

Capitalism is for everyone.

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