Hey Michael,
thanks fort the response. I think I did not explain my main points well enough.
What I wanted to illustrate was:
1.) There is no way to create money without debt. The debt is what creates the pressure for people to produce a surplus, and without this pressure there is no economy and no civilization forms. You are “stuck” in subsistence farming/hunting & gathering (which I don´t mean in a negative way).
2.) What gives the “money” (grains, metals, paper etc.) worth is no intrinsic value of the medium of exchange itself or a fixed value of “labor”. The value is created through the looming punishment by the ruling class if you fail to deliver it on tax collection day, which forces you to work and overproduce to acquire it. If you don´t produce said currency yourself (e.g. you raise pigs but tax has to be delivered in x kg of wheat), you have to trade for it ---> the economic cycle starts.
3.) Labor has no fixed or stable value, which is why a currency cannot be based on it. If I dig a hole and fill it back up, I created nothing of worth that others would trade for. Or more realistic, if I manufacture bicycles by hand and my neighbor invents an automated production line, my labor loses its value dramatically, as his bikes are much cheaper than mine. The value of labor is always depending on demand, which can change quickly (outside of subsistence farming etc.).
4.) If the government just “spends money into existence” through infrastructure investments etc., the people are not under pressure to overproduce and innovate (to not become debt slaves, or nowadays just go bankrupt). This also assumes that there “just is” a government and a society, but there would be none without the debt/civilization cycle already in place beforehand.
5.) China is a good example, as it was communist before. What allowed the Chinese economy to develop so rapidly was the introduction of private property and debt expansion. But they reached the limits of expansion too, just much faster than the West. As you have lived in China, you know how high the pressure/competition in the society is currently.
6.) The USA is also a good example, as it is basically a subsection of the British population splitting off from an existing civilization and conquering new territory as explained in my last post. They just reset the debt clock and started over again, but this is just the rise of a new civilization/society, which runs into the limits of expansion later on (no more Wild West to conquer/claim). Then you can either decline or get conquered if you don´t find new ways to grow ---> Fractional Reserve Banking, wars, Quantitative Easing etc.
What I also didn´t make clear was that I am not advocating for FRB or think that it´s “good”, I just wanted to show that our current level of technological advancement etc. relies on it and wouldn´t exist without it.
There is no way out that keeps our civilization at its current level of advancement, as you can see every time a country becomes communist:
The debt pressure is gone, the economy slowly declines and the country cannot compete any longer with the countries that keep the pressure up.
Which means there is no moral way to run a society or economy, as they both are reliant on forced debt by a ruling class to function/exist in the first place. You can just make sure that you as an individual or your family don´t fall into the avoidable debt traps (loans, credit cards etc.), but in the end you will have to pay taxes (which might go back soon to being mandatory without being based of your income/spending).
Just noticed this answer turned into another Wall of Text…
Hope this one was clearer than the first