Debt

In the comments to a recent post John Rove makes the point that neoliberals think of value in terms of money and that this tendency reduce human relations to monetary exchange. In Debt, Graeber makes the same point. Once exchange is monetized it stops being a form of human interaction and becomes a matter of dollars and cents. Those who celebrate market economies, the suggestion is, would rather not consider the messy but humanistic world of exchange and its creation of society

demonstrates that the Homo Oeconomicus which lies at the basis of all the theorems and equations that purports to render economics a science, is not only an almost impossibly boring person—basically, a monomaniacal sociopath who can wander through an orgy thinking only about marginal rates of return—but that what economists are basically doing in telling the myth of barter, is taking a kind of behavior that is only really possible after the invention of money and markets and then projecting it backwards as the purported reason for the invention of money and markets themselves.

We, or more precisely I, will return to Graeber's assault on classical econ later. Right now, it suffices to say the those who monetize relationships are sociopaths who hate humanity.