[JohnFen]

> The creation of value is me taking energy from the sun and converting that into a chair.

Which requires money to do. If you borrow that money to enable using solar to make furniture, then you can repay that money with interest and keep a profit for yourself. Both the borrower and lender come out with more money than they had when they started.

That's not a zero-sum game.

Now, it's 100% true that borrowing and lending can (and often is) done in a way to make it a zero-sum game, but that's just because the world (including the big-time corporate world, and especially including major IT companies) is full of scammers.

[DrScientist]

>> The creation of value is me taking energy from the sun and converting that into a chair.

> Which requires money to do.

No it doesn't require money. It requires energy. Money is often involved as a means of exchange, but it's not required.

If what you said is true it would be impossible to live off grid and make a chair.

By focusing on the money you are focusing on the means of exchange rather than the fundamentals - which is energy, knowledge and collaboration.

Let's take a concrete example - the development of Linux - did that require some large VC backed funding models or was it simply people sharing spare cycles for shared benefit? Here the underlying resources required was people's time [1] - not money per se.

[1] Sure some value was exchanged using the medium of money ( Red Hat existed, large companies shared larger cycles by explicitly paying employees etc ) - but that's not lending and interest with money somehow being the time limiting resource. Again don't confuse the means of exchange with the thing being exchanged.