The economic life is made up of promises and actions. Contracts are promises; money is a promise. Labor, the foundation of economic life, is action, and all economic promises cash out ultimately in action.

For Rudolf Steiner, the economic life is supposed to be a life of brotherhood and ultimately of free gift. It is supposed to be (or can only be) a life of action on behalf of other people. The Fundamental Social Law is an economic law: the healthiest form of society is one in which one's own actions redound not to oneself, but only to someone else, and where one's subsistence is sustained by others' actions, which likewise are initiated without self-interest.

In conversation, which is a microcosm of society, this social-economic law can only be applied, it seems to me, in the following way.

Speech is action of a well-defined sort, and speech acts are thus a general form of economic labor. Conversational promises, moreover, are a literal form of economic capital, or wealth. On the Fundamental Law, all of these should be undertaken only for the benefit of others. Thus, no hint of self-interest, self-indulgence or idleness should appear in one's speech. People in spiritualized conversation should not talk about how things seem to them, or appear to them or happen for them, because such conversation entails commitments (promises) and judgments of a self-interested sort. Such me-talk is like the bad money of Gresham's law, the corrupted money that drives out good money.

Speech should be confined to currency of universal benefit. For example, when judgments are made, they should be true judgments. When social intentions, such as promises and agreements are expressed, they should be material promises and agreements, performed with a certain solemnity, seriousness and in full public view. Repetitious expression of wishes and superficial pats on the back, generally speaking, just don't add up to social capital, and are most accurately viewed as anti-social.

The supply of this conversational money, moreover, should be regulated somehow to prevent an inflation of word usage and a diminution in the value of words.

A form of life and conversational propriety confined to true judgments, material promises and selfless actions, it seems to me, would be the ideal way, at a micro-social level, to realize an economic life, and a form of material existence, in which the angels could participate.