"Time is money."
- a phrase used by Benjamin Franklin in Advice to a Young Tradesman
Preface: I'm going to tie this back to politics, I swear. First off; this is not a conspiracy theory. I don't believe some shadow government has put this into effect. This is just a running analysis of how global economics affects individual lives, and the effect that politics has on that. This is something I've been musing about recently, and wanted to place it somewhere in a structured manner for some criticism. I know there are gigantic holes, citations needed, and other things here, but I'm just going to freight-train through it in hopes that it'll spark some useful thinking and discussion. I'd love it anyone has additions to this.
Time as money
The reverse is also true. A currency unit is a physically tangible manifestation someone's time and effort spent to earn it. It is, quite simply, something that someone gives you so that you will spend your time doing what they want you to do. You desire it so that you may determine that others spend their time in a way that benefits you. You use this token to encourage farmers to grow your food, tailors to sew your clothes, and artists to produce works that you enjoy.
Time as power
The physical currency unit is a result of society recognizing the only tradeable commodity that is intrinsic to every human: human effort. This is why slavery has existed since the dawn of man; controlling the time of others is the only true form of power. 'Wealth' means absolutely nothing if you cannot use it to change the behavior of other people. This is why wage-slavery is an enormous issue in the world today. For some, the 'change' that owners of currency are seeking to influence may be as simple as the desire to possess objects that others have spent time crafting. For more sinister types, there are ideological goals.
Time as punishment
'Time-theft' is considered to be the ultimate crime. 'Time-theft' is often referred to by this more popular nomenclature: murder. Incarceration is often considered one of the worst forms of punishment. Not only are they determining how (physically) you spend your time, but the punishing entity is training the confined party to spend their time in certain ways in the future.
Time, politics, and large numbers
Politics: "The activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, specifically relating to the the debate or conflict arising around the delegation and dissemination of funds and assets." Politics is, as my professor once stated: "Quite simply the process of deciding 'who gets what', and shouldn't be viewed as anything more." I feel that's very accurate.
Large numbers: To talk about the immense amount of units that some specific people control, we have to understand large numbers, and how futile even the largest of grassroots efforts are in comparison. To quote from ehd.org's 'Grasping Large Numbers' article: 1
- Whether describing the vastness of the stars or the microscopic intricacies of the human body, the need to use large numbers is often inevitable. When we consider the estimated 200,000,000,000 (200 billion) stars in the Milky Way Galaxy or the estimated 150,000,000,000 (150 billion) galaxies in the universe or the estimated 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) cells in the adult human body, we are forced to use numbers so large we cannot comprehend their meaning.
- The height of a stack of 100 one dollar bills measures .43 inches. - The height of a stack of 1,000,000 one dollar bills measures 4,300 inches or 358 feet – about the height of a 30 to 35 story building. - The height of a stack of 1,000,000,000 (one billion) one dollar bills measures 358,510 feet or 67.9 miles. This would reach blue sky: all the way from the earth’s surface into the lower portion of the troposphere – one of the major outer layers of earth’s atmosphere. - The height of a stack of 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) one dollar bills measures 67,866 miles. This would reach more than one fourth the way from the earth to the moon.One unit of currency is how much time?
This is where I start getting very interested. Who's time are we calculating? The current (and hopefully to go up soon...) federal minimum wage in the USA is $7.25. For a minimum wage employee, it takes 8 1/3 (ish) minutes to make one dollar. In Uganda it would take a minimum wage worker over two and a half weeks to make one US dollar. 3
How much time are we talking about?
The total sway of the US government's 2012 federal budget in 'US minimum wage worker hours' is 491,192,333,333.33 hours. That's 491.19 billion hours. Or, 56,035,019.39 years, if that's easier to wrap brains around. The federal government has that many man-years at it's disposal each year.
I'm not even going to calculate that in Ugandan time-to-earning-power ratio.
Currency markets, inflation, and interest
Any non-representative currency is directly controlled by the issuer. They determine the interest rates of loans between central banks and treasuries, thereby controlling supply and inflation.
The third world employee: post-scarcity, corruption, and corporate imperialism
I have a theory: I believe that we are already living in what is essentially a post-scarcity world.
I think that you'll find a common thread in every undeveloped or developing country; you'll find a few powerful individuals at the top who have total control; whether this be religious control (middle east), control over natural resources (South America), or control by threat of violence. (Africa, North Korea)
You'll also find exploitation from outside the country by gigantic conglomerations of individuals who are bound together in one, and only one legally binding and deadly-serious purpose: profit. We commonly refer to these entities as 'multi-national corporations', and this practice is regularly called 'outsourcing'.
Through oursourcing we take our time-tokens (currency units) and give them to people who's time is less important, and therefore will work for less currency. This allows us in the 1st world to have very cheap labor done by lesser humans; the byproduct of this is very inexpensive goods. Most notable in this area are textiles and electronics. If we paid western wages for the manufacture of all of our textiles and electronics manufacturing we would see a massive price hike and no longer take t-shirts and gadgets for granted.
To be frank, I believe that currency is control. It controls the producers in undeveloped countries, while the much higher values and prices of people's effort in developed nations help keep the accessibility to power (the ability to determine how other people spend their time) to an absolute minimum for all but a few individuals.
The 'working class' individuals in the richer nations are largely caught up in somewhat meaningless tasks; their actual function in society is to consume large quantities of what is being exported from poor nations. This ensures that everyone is busy; the poorest are busy producing while the 'poor' of the rich nations are busy consuming that production.
You're about six of these guys. You've almost described the elephant. Here's the truth: Money is a marker for negotiation, nothing more. Money is easy to devalue. Money is easy to exchange. Money is easy to inflate. Money goes abstract when you have a lot of it. Money goes abstract when you don't have enough. Money is really nothing more than an abstract number under constant renegotiation by all parties with the power to negotiate. Your issue is that your sole perspectives are from those who lack that power. Exhibit A: Your slavish attempt to put abstract numbers into concrete stacks of dollar bills, into minutes of life. You compare the American minimum wage to the Ugandan standard of living without recognizing that an American in Uganda will be earning Ugandan money while a Ugandan in the United States will be earning American money. What my paycheck earns me in Somalia only matters when I'm in Somalia and there are all sorts of exchanges in currency between here and there. The "value" of money is going to have a dozen different integers attached to it along the way. More than that, you tie "life" to "money" through your time-theft/murder gambit. By that reasoning, the Davos crew could go on a Safari to hunt Ugandans and simply compensate the families of their quarry out of pocket change. Yet you will find that if you try this without something other than "money" to back up your actions, a whole bunch of poor people will quickly "devalue" your life-worth. I suppose if you look at it that way, France was a currency renegotiation. The Boer War was a currency renegotiation. Haiti was a currency renegotiation. But that's making the reality fit the analogy, rather than the other way 'round. I suggest reading Graeber. He makes the point that anthropologically, slavery is the net cause of currency because in close-knit tribal societies where everyone values everyone else to greater or lesser extent, commerce and civilization function on a favor economy. It is only when you decontextualize people through war, kidnapping and slavery that any sort of currency arises... thus, most primitive cultures have a value most commonly assigned to those things that traveling nomads, raiding warriors and other never-see-them-again trading partners are likely to desire. Currency, then, is something you exchange only with people you have no reason to trust. And that's where the information I have disagrees 100% with the information you have: I have become convinced through my readings that currency is used where people have no control. If I don't know you and you don't know me, I will make you a sandwich for $5. If you're my buddy Charlie I'll make you a sandwich for free because I can expect you to make me a sandwich when we're at your house. Currency, then, is a way to get what you want from someone you don't know without having to resort to violence. It doesn't matter to me what a Ugandan thinks my life is worth until that Ugandan is pointing a gun at me. It doesn't matter to a Ugandan what I think his life is worth until that number drops below my profit margin. And even then, it's a negotiation: insurance companies have all sorts of actuarial tables as to the value of a human life, and any wrongful death lawsuit involves moving the peg around those tables to the optimization of either party. He had a kid? Add 100k. He was a smoker? Subtract 50k. But again - it's a proxy for violence and warfare. "You ran over my husband, I demand vengeance" becomes "you ran over my husband, through currency we can continue to peacefully coexist in one society." It's easy to fixate on the "haves" and the "have nots." The have nots will never have enough money and the haves will always have too much. However, in a society governed by currency the haves and the have nots will rarely interact... and when they do, currency takes a back seat. It's easy to hate the rich in abstract but Mr. Jefferson is so nice... he always says hello in the elevator and asks about little Janie. Stop worrying about currency. It's an abstraction. Until you exchange it for goods and services, it's every bit as valueless as upvotes... and the majority of the time, currency isn't exchanged for goods and services, it's used as negotiation.
To be frank, I believe that currency is control.
Well, as you'd expect, quantitative easing is pretty much exactly what I'm talking about when I decry currency's hold on citizens. I have no idea what the solution is, but I know that QE and lots of other financial practices are dishonest and border on immoral (in my opinion). Politically, QE makes your numbers as a leader look great; but the price is paid by others who aren't in positions of power.
It's a difficult issue. If we assume that currency is a proxy for time (and not everyone's time is measured with equal value) then the issuing new currency means that the present pool of currency should be diluted, and decreases in value. However, every time a loan or similar contract is made, currency is created. There was an interesting paper recently published by the Bank of England that concluded that it is the banks that typically drive the rate of currency creation. That being the case, then loans themselves would be suspect. But, what would be the consequence of living in a world without lending? It seems to me that an economy that has both inflating assets as well as deflating assets is probably the healthiest approach, and every individual should be able to move wealth between the two, so both opportunity and shelter could be sought when needed. IMHO the Keynesians and Austrian economists are probably both right and wrong in equal measure, and practicing either one exclusively is likely to cause trouble after a time. wasoxygen :)
The money supply is complicated, and I am inclined to go read Wikipedia until the end of lunch hour, but I also appreciate being invited to the conversation so I'll spout off some ideas and hope they are not nonsense. There is a difference between owning a dollar and controlling a unit of currency. It reminds me of the old Missing Dollar riddle. The reality is clarified if we slow down and simply ask ourselves where the dollars are at any point. Say my net worth is $100; that is the amount of dollars I own and I have no debt. I open an account with the Bank of MK and deposit the $100. My net worth is still $100. The net worth of the Bank of MK has not changed either. It now controls my $100; it has an asset and a debt which cancel out. The Bank of MK loans $50 to flagamuffin. The Bank of MK now has a debt of $100 to me, a $50 credit owed from flagamuffin, and $50 in cash assets. Its net worth has not changed. flagamuffin has a cash asset and a debt which cancel out. There is still only $100 in the system, and no one's net worth has changed. flagamuffin makes some profit, using his loan to cover costs of his small poetry business, and pays off his loan, keeping some of the profit. He is up. The bank now has some interest income, so it shows a modest gain in net worth. I close my account and get my $100 back, maybe with a little interest. The system still has the original $100. The bank has a little profit from flagamuffin, who has a little profit from his business, and his customers have a little less cash but are enriched with poems. Everyone is better off. If it's not clear that no currency had to be created, you can imagine this whole process happening with real paper banknotes and metal coins. We only use electronic credits for convenience. The multiplier is real, but not because it increases the money supply. It just moves existing money to people who are ready to use it.every time a loan or similar contract is made, currency is created
Thanks for joining. I believe that this is exactly the scenario that the Bank of England calls a misconception about modern banking. From their paper, top of page 16. Of course, it's more complicated, and the paper addresses this, but these are the misconceptions as they see it (sorry for the long quote, but I think it's worth it; page 15): In fact, when households choose to save more money in bank accounts, those deposits come simply at the expense of deposits that would have otherwise gone to companies in payment for goods and services. Saving does not by itself increase the deposits or ‘funds available’ for banks to lend. Indeed, viewing banks simply as intermediaries ignores the fact that, in reality in the modern economy, commercial banks are the creators of deposit money. This article explains how, rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending creates deposits — the reverse of the sequence typically described in textbooks. Another common misconception is that the central bank determines the quantity of loans and deposits in the economy by controlling the quantity of central bank money — the so-called ‘money multiplier’ approach. In that view, central banks implement monetary policy by choosing a quantity of reserves. And, because there is assumed to be a constant ratio of broad money to base money, these reserves are then ‘multiplied up’ to a much greater change in bank loans and deposits. For the theory to hold, the amount of reserves must be a binding constraint on lending, and the central bank must directly determine the amount of reserves. While the money multiplier theory can be a useful way of introducing money and banking in economic textbooks, it is not an accurate description of how money is created in reality. Rather than controlling the quantity of reserves, central banks today typically implement monetary policy by setting the price of reserves — that is, interest rates. In reality, neither are reserves a binding constraint on lending, nor does the central bank fix the amount of reserves that are available. As with the relationship between deposits and loans, the relationship between reserves and loans typically operates in the reverse way to that described in some economics textbooks. Banks first decide how much to lend depending on the profitable lending opportunities available to them — which will, crucially, depend on the interest rate set by the Bank of England. It is these lending decisions that determine how many bank deposits are created by the banking system. The amount of bank deposits in turn influences how much central bank money banks want to hold in reserve (to meet withdrawals by the public, make payments to other banks, or meet regulatory liquidity requirements), which is then, in normal times, supplied on demand by the Bank of England. The rest of this article discusses these practices in more detail. So as I understand the argument, it's not the actual reserves, but the price of those reserves that controls their lending, and thus the size of their reserves; thus, banks can create money when they lend.The Bank of MK loans $50 to flagamuffin. The Bank of MK now has a debt of $100 to me, a $50 credit owed from flagamuffin, and $50 in cash assets. Its net worth has not changed. flagamuffin has a cash asset and a debt which cancel out.
Commercial banks create money, in the form of bank deposits, by making new loans. When a bank makes a loan, for example to someone taking out a mortgage to buy a house, it does not typically do so by giving them thousands of pounds worth of banknotes. Instead, it credits their bank account with a bank deposit of the size of the mortgage. At that moment, new money is created. For this reason, some economists have referred to bank deposits as ‘fountain pen money’, created at the stroke of bankers’ pens when they approve loans.
The vast majority of money held by the public takes the form of bank deposits. But where the stock of bank deposits comes from is often misunderstood. One common misconception is that banks act simply as intermediaries, lending out the deposits that savers place with them. In this view deposits are typically ‘created’ by the saving decisions of households, and banks then ‘lend out’ those existing deposits to borrowers, for example to companies looking to finance investment or individuals wanting to purchase houses.
My earlier remarks were mostly speculation and intuition. I drafted another indignant reply before coming to my senses and doing more reading and thinking. Graeber's breathless article about the Bank of England's "radical" "new position" is a lot of nonsense. I haven't looked carefully at the "Money Creation" paper, but it mentions a companion paper, Money in the modern economy: an introduction, which led me to believe that my disagreement was mostly semantic. It says that "Money today is a type of IOU." Saying that banks can create money, by this definition, is equivalent to saying that lenders can create loans. This has been going on for thousands of years. As Graeber has it: The Bank of England is rather more sedate: When I borrow lunch money from a coworker, she is also creating money in this sense. My promise to repay is a financial liability to me and a financial asset to her. The main difference between my IOU and a federal reserve note is that she can't exchange my IOU for a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Uncle Sam is widely recognized as a reliable debtor, and I am not. The Bank of England: These financial instruments always balance out: credits and debts cancel, so the act of making a loan does not change the number of dollars in circulation, what a casual reader thinks of as "money." The Bank of England is careful to show this equivalence: Interestingly, the Bank of England depicts all of the central bank's liabilities as backed by non-money assets.In other words, everything we know is not just wrong – it's backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU.
Banks can create new money because bank deposits are just IOUs of the bank; banks’ ability to create IOUs is no different to anyone else in the economy.
Because financial assets are claims on someone else in the economy, they are also financial liabilities — one person’s financial asset is always someone else’s debt.
I would like to add, mk, that I am still fuzzy on a lot of the Bank of England information on modern banking. There are many mysterious and complicated phenomena in the world. We are told that matter and antimatter particles are constantly coming into existence out of nowhere and then annihilating each other. This is very interesting and confusing. I am dismissive of Graeber because he reminds me of someone who distorts the science to sell books about crystal power or UFOs. He uses the financial world’s unfamiliar definition of “money” to support the Occupy movement’s portrayal of banks as predatory schemers deceiving customers and getting rich (he convinced the headline writer: the banks are “rolling in it”). There is a sense in which the bank’s fountain pen brings money into existence ex nihilo. Before I bought a house, I spent a good while with a bank officer watching the fountain pen do its thing. At the end, indeed, the largest chunk of money I had ever seen appeared. This new money was a credit in my name. Of course it was, that’s what I traded to get the house! The bank got a couple hundred bucks in service fees. At the same time, the magic fountain pen created a debt, of equal magnitude and opposite direction to the credit, also in my name. I solemnly promised to spend thirty years annihilating this debt. As I return the bank’s federal reserve notes, I pay a kind of rent for the ones I am still using to keep the house’s former owner happy, this is the interest that the conventional view tells us the bank counts as income. It is hard for me to remember that currency is not intrinsically valuable. I call it “money” which I use interchangeably with “wealth.” We should remind ourselves that banknotes are just notes, like Post-It notes, with a promise written on them, complete with a formal signature. When I reread your excerpt from page 15 and mentally substitute “IOU” for “money,” it makes more sense. But not perfect sense. This sentence in particular is hard for me to understand: In the conventional view, if I transfer my savings from Wells Fargo to First Union, First Union can then approve more car loans. I thought that was the whole purpose of the fractional reserve system. Banks are required to keep 10% on hand for people who might demand cash that day, the balance of the cash can be extended as credit. “Extended as credit” means the cash — the Federal Reserve’s IOUs — is given to home sellers and car dealers who can then trade them for gold bars immediately if they choose. The IOUs, and their power to obtain gold bars, must be in the bank's hands before they can be given away. Perhaps _refugee_ can give us a professional opinion.
Saving does not by itself increase the deposits or ‘funds available’ for banks to lend.
This is an extremely macro view. "All the money is in the system and can be assumed to be in the bank; the account doesn't matter; the bank is the institution through which all money flows, so regardless of where the money is, the money is in the bank." I think this is silly. At the end of the day, the bank has a balance sheet. The sheet must be balanced. If banks simply created loan after loan after loan without deposits and other income (fees) they would show marginal income on year-end reports based solely off of the interest made on the loans, assuming all borrowers repay. Deposits are necessary. I think this article may be making the point that because banks act on such a macro level, they can afford to lend out more money on say, Tuesday, than they actually have in deposits - because they can count on the fact that by Friday, everyone gets paid by direct deposit, it'll even out. A bank could not fountain pen money into existence if it did not have deposits. A bank can only seemingly "fountain pen" money into existence because these days they are so huge. If I am a small bank or a credit union and I really only have $10,000 of money - let's say some is start-up capital or whatever, but most is deposits - if that is all I have on my balance sheet, sure I can "lend out" $12,000 by simply fiddling numbers in the system, but then I am factually $2k in the hole, and either I have to make that money up somehow or I'm going to be in the red when I report my earnings for the year. I'm not ENRON and we'll assume I'm not ENRON-izing my report. Sure, at the end of the day, I can lend way more money than I have - if I am a major bank with systems, ATMs, networks, and all the systems that would enable it to appear that that money is actually there. But that money has to come back to me. I can't count on a 100% rate of return on my loans so the interest on the good loans isn't going to be enough to turn a profit, plus not to mention all the people I have to pay in order to service these loans and run my Collections department. It'd be unwise to depend on investments to return that money because basically that's not reliable. If we have a closed system and there is $100 in the system and Alice has $50 and Bob has $50, sure, Carol can go to the Bank of Ted and ask for $100. The Bank of Ted can even say "Sure! Here, have $100!" but unless Alice and Bob actually believe the Bank of Ted has $100 already, Carol doesn't have $100. Alice and Bob will not believe that the Bank of Ted has money simply because BoT says it has money; it needs to be an accepted fact that BoT is "the place where all the money is." If Alice and Bob know BoT has no money they will not accept BoT's notes. I feel like I'm missing some sort of point here or something. Yeah, rereading it, and just not getting it. They're basically saying that because banks use systems and not real money, banks can fudge the numbers and just make it look like there's money somewhere even when nothing happened to make that money appear wrt "real money" or physical money.In fact, when households choose to save more money in bank accounts, those deposits come simply at the expense of deposits that would have otherwise gone to companies in payment for goods and services.
This article explains how, rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending creates deposits
Commercial banks create money, in the form of bank deposits, by making new loans. When a bank makes a loan, for example to someone taking out a mortgage to buy a house, it does not typically do so by giving them thousands of pounds worth of banknotes. Instead, it credits their bank account with a bank deposit of the size of the mortgage. At that moment, new money is created. For this reason, some economists have referred to bank deposits as ‘fountain pen money’, created at the stroke of bankers’ pens when they approve loans.
Yes, I don't think it's fair to hold the Bank of England to Graeber's interpretation. From a few readings, my take away is that the lending of banks is limited not by availability of notes printed by the Reserve (and thus a proportion of savings deposits), but instead by the cost of a bank's deposits, and the return on its assets. From page 20: Thus, the bank can lend when they feel the loan will perform well enough to cover their liabilities, and this lending creates more money as it increases their balance sheet (to be reduced as the lender pays it back). From page 20: This demand for base money is therefore more likely to be a consequence rather than a cause of banks making loans and creating broad money. This is because banks’ decisions to extend credit are based on the availability of profitable lending opportunities at any given point in time. The profitability of making a loan will depend on a number of factors, as discussed earlier. One of these is the cost of funds that banks face, which is closely related to the interest rate paid on reserves, the policy rate. That demand that the central bank typically accommodates part is where I think a potato/potato argument can be made. What I think the Bank of London is saying here, is that the Reserve isn't making the decision of whether or not there needs to be more money in circulation, but it is the banks that are making that determination. In fact, the Reserve adjusts the costs of lending, and that alters the math when a bank is deciding whether or not to create a new loan, and this bring more money into the system. It's very interesting stuff.Banks receive interest payments on their assets, such as loans, but they also generally have to pay interest on their liabilities, such as savings accounts. A bank’s business model relies on receiving a higher interest rate on the loans (or other assets) than the rate it pays out on its deposits (or other liabilities). Interest rates on both banks’ assets and liabilities depend on the policy rate set by the Bank of England, which acts as the ultimate constraint on money creation.
The supply of both reserves and currency (which together make up base money) is determined by banks’ demand for reserves both for the settlement of payments and to meet demand for currency from their customers — demand that the central bank typically accommodates.
And that's a dangerous process. I'd never advocate for a world without lending but I would state strongly that our world is over-lended. There are many wasted resources that could/should be going into infrastructure and R&D if there was a more sane way of distributing man hours over projects that need to be worked on. Right now there is a lot of politics, luck, and avarice involved with the process of getting any type of currency leverage. I think this is very astute. I don't know what the model would look like when finished, but I think that there is a strong argument for that type of system.every time a loan or similar contract is made, currency is created
It seems to me that an economy that had both inflating assets as well as deflating assets is probably the healthiest approach
My whole premise is that capital can be boiled down to a condensed representation of labor.
Would you care to explain your opinion of my work, rather than belittle it?
I wasn't trying to sound condescending. I was just pointing out the fact that the premise is a bit flawed. Time and money have one essential thing in common. Namely, they're both valuable. That's the nature of their relationship, and the reason that they're often used in exchange for one another. But, they're not equivalents. We can see this simply by looking at, for example, investment income. Pure investment income is completely divorced from "effort". In fact, the whole point of capitalism is to separate labor and capital. Marx tried to tie them back together, and his efforts eventually led to the further enslavement of many millions of people. I think I understand your sentiment that for most people, a dollar represents X number of hours of work, and therefore, each product purchased can be thought of as "costing" some given amount of time. But this is only accurate in the simplest case when one has only one income stream and this income is derived solely from hourly wages. Perhaps this is the way the majority of people in the world get money. But still, it represents only one way. The relationship between money and labor is correlative not causitive, in that sense. This is a non-trivial point, because when you start with an incorrect premise, you're bound to draw incorrect conclusions. All this isn't to demean your point that a huge number of people in the world are held in permanent bondage due to nothing but their birth position. It's to illustrate that when you blame money for that problem, you're going to end up advocating solutions that have already been advocated and failed in the past, solutions which were based on the same premise (e.g. communism).
I don't find this comment demeaning at all. Thanks for the effort. I was speaking in broad brush terms; money = time to about 99% of the world. Probaboy 99.9% of the world. I understand your point about marxism vs. capitalism and cede that if I took my viewpoint too far I would indeed roll into a communistic sort of a worldview. I certainly haven't reached that point yet, though. ;)
Not if you're Calvinist. This statement requires a belief that were it not for the murder, you would live (substantially) longer. The amount of time stolen by murder is variable and incalculable. If murder were really simply time-theft, we'd punish criminals based on an analysis of how much time was stolen. I'm inclined to think that murder and incarceration are both more aptly considered "theft/loss of liberty." Even here, what you describe is the loss of how you are able to spend your time, and not the actual loss of your time itself. Is money freedom? I'd say having money is up to 90% freedom. There are things that cannot be bought. If you are enslaved to other things, money cannot necessarily free you, but it can buy you attempts: therapy; paying off the cop so he doesn't arrest you; rehab; forgiveness. Having money doesn't mean you're free, but if you're unencumbered by other deficiencies, it allows you to fully realize your freedom. As to your theory - sure, why not? - but so what?'Time-theft' is considered to be the ultimate crime. 'Time-theft' is often referred to by this more popular nomenclature: murder.
Not only are they determining how (physically) you spend your time, but the punishing entity is training the confined party to spend their time in certain ways in the future.