(12-10-2010, 11:51 PM)turtledude23 Wrote: The majority of people in "developed" countries don't like their jobs, let alone in developing countries. We work for money because we need it to buy things we need and things we want. People give us goods and services in exchange for money because they assume it has a value. Its a material equivalent of energy. But in new relatively new countries like the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. one day a central bank produced a bunch of coins and bills to replace bartering. These pieces of metal and woven cloth or paper only had value because everyone in the country agreed that they have value. Now we we have international trade with many different currencies, each is accepted as having a certain value.
So how can governments be in debt or run out of money if they create it and assign it value? The currencies initial value was arbitrarily assigned, surely any country in financial trouble like Greece could somehow change their currency. I'm not talking about just printing more, that causes inflation, I mean stepping up and saying to the domestic and foreign companies "I don't care how much money you want for your product/service, we can't provide that, take what we're offering or stop doing business in this country", then it would be possible to create even wealth distribution and low prices without socialism or communism.
I dunno about conspiracy theories since I don't pay them much heed. This post will address part of your OP

On the first paragraph, that's basically right. It started out as we agreed on certain items having more inherent worth, such as things like gold, silver, bronze, stones, salt, and other useful materials. Then, because barter has several problems with it (like how there's no uniform currency, items can expire, people have to have what other people want, etc), we moved to a system where currency represented those items; in the case of the United States (and most of the world) that is paper money representing gold. We now operate on a system of "fiat money" - that is, money does not represent gold and gets its value from the masses agreeing that it has worth and trusting that it will keep its worth.
Governments can be in debt or run out of money because there are more than one of them. If there were a single government, there couldn't be debt (Edit: wrong, there could be debt - see next post). Because government a owes government b something, government b will hold that debt against government a. If government a thinks it can't pay back that debt and it defaults on the debts, then it loses respect and trust in the international community and the value of its money plummets.
