NEO Magazine Issue 2 | Page 67

uses of the not for profit corporate designation is to provide governments the capacity to know who is supporting what. On taxation forms, itemized deductions for charitable contributions, certain educational or business expenses and the like provide intrusion in the name of “savings”. Monetary and taxation authorities are relentless in their insistence of representing all human exchanges in their monetary equivalent in part to extract tariffs but equally for the intelligence of association that such exchanges represent. Value for human exchanges of physical reality or services and experience are assumed to be reducible to a monetary quantification. This taxation of ephemeral value - an innovation of the Napoleonic accounting schemes in the early 1800s (also to pay for war) - encroaches into numerous social experiences. Illusions of appreciation of monetary value of physical artifacts (like real estate) are used to manipulate national economies and provide socialized subsidies for certain sectors (like banks and insurers). Equally, illusions of depreciation encourage consumerism and extinction of natural resources - another subtle socialized subsidy for industrial producers. We’re not encouraged to discuss either of these illusions nor the masters they serve as doing so could destabilize entrenched interests. Money: Agency of Separation We’re bombarded with statistics (counting money) telling us of massive asymmetry in monetary wealth between strata of society and between nation states. “Rich” - meas- ured by hoarded retention of profit vs. “Poor” measured by the absence of hoarded reserves are ubiquitous distinctions that are recklessly reinforced by incumbent and anarchist alike. Ironically, the unconsidered nature of the very notion of profit is the manifestation of this agency of separation. After all, what is profit? Profit can be an excessive rent charged by one party over the cumulative cost to provide a good or service to another in which case a premium is demanded by the purveyor of said good or service. Alternatively it can serve as an explicit metric of the failure to account for the true cost of the production of a good or service. And in both cases, incentives for perverse separation are inextricably bound. From Adam Smith to Karl Marx, the neglect of the planet and its inhabitants are intrinsic to the odious addiction to profit. If, for example, I am an industrialist seeking a consumer base, my objective is to pay for resources and compensate labor at the marginal rate that allows the earth and laborer to barely make it with just