20/09/2026
VALUE SYSTEMS AND MONEY
By claude.ai (edited by MD Pienaar)
Money is often treated as a neutral instrument — a unit of account, a medium of exchange, a store of value, indifferent to the purposes it serves. But no money system is neutral. Every currency, every credit mechanism, every unit devised for exchange is built on a prior decision about what kind of human activity deserves to be rewarded, and how much. That decision is a value system. It is visible not in the metal or paper or ledger entry itself, but in the rules that govern what the money is for — who may create it, what it may be used to fund, and what counts as an acceptable return.
This essay argues that money systems are, in effect, embodied ethics: each one encodes an implicit theory of the good. It examines this claim through a contemporary case — Moyom (MYM) venture capital angel money, used on Ipparts Exchange (IPPAEX), which is structured to fund ventures for minimum, reasonable profit rather than maximum profit — and sets it against the dominant logic of fiat money today, before turning to historical money systems that encoded still other values.
The value system of ordinary fiat capital: greed, maximum profit, and charity as a single cluster.
Contemporary fiat money, as it circulates through most venture and investment markets, tends to organize itself around two complimentary poles. On one side is capital seeking maximum return: venture funding, private equity, and speculative investment are governed by the expectation that money should multiply as fast and as far as the market allows, with risk priced accordingly. On the other side sits charity: money given away with no expectation of return at all, motivated by pride/pity, obligation, or reputation rather than yield. Morally, these two poles are not as opposed as they first appear; they belong to the same value cluster. Maximum-profit capital is, at root, the institutionalization of greed as a legitimate economic motive — the conviction that a return should be pushed as high as the market will bear, regardless of what that pursuit does to workers, consumers, communities, or the enterprise's own long-term stability. Charity, in this cluster, functions less as an alternative ethic than as the fiat system's own remedy for the damage that maximization causes: it is the redistribution that becomes necessary after wealth has been extracted at the maximum rate, given back in a separate, voluntary transaction that leaves the original extraction untouched. Greed creates the deficit; charity patches it. The two are morally paired, not morally opposed, because one presupposes the other — a system organized around maximizing private gain will always need a compensatory mechanism for redistributing some of that gain afterward, and charity is that mechanism.
What is notable is the near-absence of a serious middle category between them. Fiat capital markets are built to sort activity into "for profit, maximized" or "not for profit, and therefore outside the profit logic altogether." A venture that aims for steady, modest, sufficient returns — profitable enough to sustain itself and reward its backers fairly, but deliberately uninterested in maximization/charity — has few natural homes in this system. It is too commercial for a grant-maker and too modest for a venture fund. The value system embedded in ordinary fiat capital, in other words, treats "reasonable but bounded profit" as almost a category error, because the system was built to optimize for extremes: growth without limit on one side, and, to compensate for growth without limit, generosity without return on the other.
Moyom (MYM) and Ipparts Exchange (IPPAEX): reasonable profit, and a reduced need for charity.
Moyom (MYM) venture capital angel money, as used on Ipparts Exchange (IPPAEX), is instructive precisely because it is structured against the grain. Its founding rule is not "maximize return" but "fund ventures for minimum, reasonable profit." This is a substantive ethical commitment, not a technical detail. It says, in effect, that the purpose of capital is to enable viable enterprise — enterprise that can sustain itself, pay its people, and reward its backers — without treating the multiplication of money as an end in itself.
This changes what MYM capital selects for. A fiat venture fund optimized for maximum return will favor ventures with the steepest possible growth curves, even at the cost of instability, extraction, or externalities, because the fund's mandate is to maximize the number attached to the investment. MYM capital, by contrast, selects for ventures whose founders are content with sufficiency: businesses that can be sustainable, well-run, and modestly profitable without needing to become extractive or extreme to satisfy their backers. In value terms, MYM money encodes something closer to a doctrine of proportion or moderation than a doctrine of maximization — closer, as will be seen below, to older traditions that treated unlimited gain with suspicion, even while accepting that legitimate enterprise deserves a fair return.
Where fiat's maximum-profit-and-charity pairing is a cycle of extraction followed by remedy, MYM's reasonable-profit rule aims to interrupt that cycle earlier, at the point of extraction itself. If a venture is funded and priced from the outset to take only a reasonable, sufficient return — rather than the maximum the market will bear — less wealth is pulled out of workers, consumers, and communities in the first place, and correspondingly less needs to be given back afterward through charity to correct the imbalance. Reasonable profit and a reduced necessity for charity thus belong together as a value cluster in the same way that greed, maximum profit, and charity belong together on the fiat side.
This pairing is not incidental to MYM; it reflects the explicit moral foundation its founder, Marquard Dirk Pienaar, has articulated for it under the name Intequinism. In material published about the philosophy and about MYM itself, Pienaar frames capitalism's usual pursuit of maximum prices and maximum profit as a distortion of goodwill — arguing that minimum, reasonable prices leave more value with consumers and better respect the brand value (goodwill) a business has built, whereas maximizing price per transaction is, in his account, a misreading of what goodwill actually is.[^1] He grounds this in two ideas he treats as paramount — Truth and Love — a pairing he credits to a conclusion reached by Bertrand Russell as well, and against which he sets what he calls idolatry/messianism: capital and belief structures in which only a distant, abstracted "God" or ideal is credited with being honest, and real people are treated as expendable in its service.[^2] On this account, an explicit purpose of Ipparts Exchange (IPPAEX) and MYM is to fund people acting honestly and with good will toward others, and MYM is designed to be debt-free and interest-free, in favor of development work, with backers unable to force a venture's liquidation the way a lender can. This happens too often at startups, consequently transferring the value to lenders.[^3] Whatever one makes of the wider philosophy, the moral logic connecting reasonable profit to reduced reliance on charity is stated directly in this source material, not merely implied by the mechanics of the token.
Historical money systems as historical value systems
MYM is not the first monetary arrangement to build an ethical stance directly into its rules. History offers several instructive parallels, each showing that "what money is for" has never been a single, fixed answer.
Medieval and Islamic prohibitions on usury. Both the medieval Christian Church and classical Islamic jurisprudence restricted or forbade riba — the charging of interest on loans, understood as unearned gain extracted from another's need. This was not merely a technical banking rule; it reflected a value system in which money was meant to facilitate real trade and mutual benefit, and profit was legitimate only when tied to shared risk and genuine productive activity, as in the Islamic mudarabah and musharakah partnership structures, where the financier shares in the venture's actual fortunes rather than extracting a fixed, riskless return. Like MYM's minimum-reasonable-profit rule, these systems drew a moral line not against profit itself, but against profit divorced from proportionate risk and productive contribution. The no-interest principle applying at MYM, does not imply no interest in other respects. Debt funding has a place in society but not on IPPAEX.
Demurrage and Gesellian currencies.
In 1932, the Austrian town of Wörgl issued a local "Freigeld" (free money) that lost value the longer it was held, following the economic theory of Silvio Gesell. The explicit purpose was to discourage hoarding and encourage the money's rapid circulation into wages, goods, and local investment, on the theory that money's value lies in its use, not its accumulation. This is a value system nearly opposite to a maximizing fiat instrument: it treats idle money as the failure mode to be designed against, rather than treating insufficient growth as the failure mode.
Mutual credit and local exchange systems. Systems such as LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems) or Ithaca HOURS create currency denominated in units of local labor or need rather than external commodity value, with the explicit purpose of keeping value circulating within a community and rewarding contribution rather than capital ownership. The underlying value system prizes local self-sufficiency and equitable participation over the accumulation logic of the wider fiat economy in which such systems are embedded.
Commodity and metallic standards.
Even the gold standard, often treated as the most "neutral" of monetary arrangements, encoded a value system: a commitment to scarcity, discipline, and resistance to arbitrary expansion of the money supply, reflecting a belief that monetary value should be anchored to something outside human decision-making. Fiat money's abandonment of that anchor reflects the opposite value commitment — that monetary policy should be a deliberate, discretionary instrument of collective economic management, trusted to human institutions rather than to a fixed external standard.
What these systems have in common
Across these cases, a pattern emerges. A money system's rules about creation (who may issue it, and under what conditions), circulation (whether holding it is rewarded or penalized), and legitimate return (what counts as fair gain, and what counts as extraction) together constitute a working theory of economic virtue. Usury prohibitions valued proportionate risk-sharing over riskless extraction. Gift economies valued circulation and obligation over accumulation. Demurrage currencies valued use over hoarding. Mutual credit systems valued local reciprocity over external capital ownership. The gold standard valued external discipline over discretionary management, and fiat money inverted that in favor of managed flexibility.
MYM's rule — fund ventures for minimum, reasonable profit — belongs in this company, and its moral logic is the mirror image of fiat's. Fiat pairs greed, maximum profit, and charity: unlimited extraction on one side, compensatory giving on the other, with the giving forever chasing the damage the extraction causes. MYM pairs reasonable profit with a reduced necessity for charity: it tries to build restraint into the point of funding and pricing itself, so that less imbalance is created that would later need correcting. Both are coherent moral systems. They simply locate virtue at different points in the economic process — fiat locates it in the redistribution that follows maximization, MYM in the moderation that precedes it.
Conclusion
Money is never merely a technology of exchange; it is always also a technology of value — and, as the case of MYM shows, sometimes an explicitly stated moral position rather than an implicit one. The rules that govern what a currency may fund, how it must circulate, and what counts as an acceptable return are, in every case examined here, a compressed statement of what a community or system considers good. Fiat capital's split between maximum-profit investment and no-return charity is one such statement — greed and generosity locked together as cause and remedy. The usury prohibitions of medieval and Islamic law, the demurrage currencies of interwar Austria, and the mutual credit systems of the modern local-exchange movement are others, each built around a different conception of what money is owed to do. MYM's minimum-reasonable-profit mandate on Ipparts Exchange (IPPAEX), grounded explicitly by its founder in the values of Truth and Love and in opposition to what he calls idolatry/messianism, stands in this same tradition: a monetary rule that is, at the same time, an ethical claim — that enterprise deserves a fair and sufficient return, that funding should go to honest and well-intentioned people, and that reducing the need for charity by moderating profit at the source is itself a moral achievement, not merely an economic one.
[^1]: Brett Stevens, "Interview With Marquard Dirk Pienaar, Founder of Intequinism," Amerika, April 13, 2019.
[^2]: White Paper for Moyom (MYM), Venture Capital, Angel Money, africahead.github.io.
[^3]: "Ipparts Exchange (IPPAEX)," africahead.github.io/Africahead/IppartsExchange.html.
References for further reading on MYM's moral values
Marquard Dirk Pienaar, Intequinism (2017) — the book-length statement of the underlying philosophy, on the relation between capital, ideas ("intequity"), and the values of Truth and Love.
Brett Stevens, "Interview With Marquard Dirk Pienaar, Founder of Intequinism," Amerika, 2019.
White Paper for Moyom (MYM), Venture Capital, Angel Money, africahead.github.io.
"Moyom (MYM), Venture Capital, Angel Money," africahead.github.io.
"Ipparts Exchange (IPPAEX)," africahead.github.io.
Trading and sharing others' Intellectual Property, without spying and appropriating others' 'intelligence'.
