Merged A Thread for AlexPontik to Explain his Ideas

According to The Orville, "It's money...You give it to people, and they give you stuff of they do stuff."
 
HansMustermann said:
Yes, but what you have there then is special pleading. In both cases you only exchange a deed, i.e., token of ownership. You don't haul the house onto a truck and give it to the other guy, either. What you exchange are basically just some pieces of paper saying you own house A now, and the other guy now owns house B.

Yet apparently according to you, one of them is money, the other is not. For no obvious reason.
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:jaw-dropp That is a seriously convoluted piece of twisted logic you have going on there.

If I were to exchange something for the deed to a house and instead of living in the house I exchanged the deed for something else then you might argue that since the deed was used as a medium of exchange, the deed functioned as money.

However, that is definitely not the scenario that you are describing. This is just a straight out swap of two houses. Nobody has even thought that one deed is money and the other is not.

HansMustermann said:
So how's it different enough when you exchange a token for a sack of grain from when you exchange a token for a house? Exactly what makes the former money, but the latter not money, according to you?

To make it clear, the token for the grain wasn't some kind of bond backed by government grain. It was a receipt that you physically own a sack of grain, and it's stored for you in the city granary. But you actually own it. It's not some conversion that you might or might not make. It says that physically there is a sack of grain there that you brought there for storage, but otherwise still own just the same as if it were in your own barn.
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When I pointed out that this was the same thing that happened in a gold standard, you didn't dare to address this point.

Care to explain why it is different if gold rather than grain is the commodity involved?
 
Except it wasn't used just as a standard for the value of tokens, unlike gold. We're talking actual grain that people ate. So basically... what? if you live in the house, but eat the grain, the latter is somehow money instead of a good, but the former is not?
 
HansMustermann said:
Except it wasn't used just as a standard for the value of tokens, unlike gold.
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Of course they were. The receipts were worth so much grain. Of course, demurrage applied to the receiptss since grain was subject to loss due to spoilage etc. That's the only difference between receipts for grain and receipts for gold but that doesn't stop the grain receipts from being used as a medium of exchange.

The rest of your paragraph is basically nonsense. You suddenly switched from the receipts to the products themselves.
 
Because AGAIN, the receipt wasn't just backed by government grain. It was grain that you yourself had deposited in a silo, and could withdraw and eat at any point, and in fact people did. Their daily bread and beer were actually made from that grain. Giving away the receipt was giving away the grain.

Basically it's you who's using some convoluted nonsense logic for why it's somehow money instead of a product, for no obvious reason.
 
HansMustermann said:
Because AGAIN, the receipt wasn't just backed by government grain. It was grain that you yourself had deposited in a silo, and could withdraw and eat at any point, and in fact people did.
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That is no different to how the gold standard operated. The Treasury notes were receipts for gold that was received and holders of these notes could exchange them at the Treasury for the gold they held. You are trying to create an artificial distinction where none exists.

At the end of the day, these receipts were a medium of exchange and that makes them money.
 
Up until relatively recently US greenbacks were "silver certificates" and were actually redeemable in silver. When the government ended this, there was a deadline for holders of silver certificates to get their silver, and many did. They cashed in their bills for actual, little bags of raw silver. Yet most people would consider that although the issuance and redemption of those certificates might qualify them as barter, they served as money in between times.

The Egyptian system might be seen as "proto-money" in that the space between issuance and redemption of a title was likely shorter and more dependent on knowledge of the underlying material and a more fluid definition of value, but I would contend that insofar as a person could use a title to make a transaction in which neither party produced or consumed the goods, the title was effectively currency. If you obtained a title to a pile of grain in payment for a quantity of masonry work, and you use that title to obtain a horse, the substance of the title is abstract, and the value is determined only by faith in its existence and integrity.
 
bruto said:
Up until relatively recently US greenbacks were "silver certificates" and were actually redeemable in silver. When the government ended this, there was a deadline for holders of silver certificates to get their silver, and many did. They cashed in their bills for actual, little bags of raw silver. Yet most people would consider that although the issuance and redemption of those certificates might qualify them as barter, they served as money in between times.

The Egyptian system might be seen as "proto-money" in that the space between issuance and redemption of a title was likely shorter and more dependent on knowledge of the underlying material and a more fluid definition of value, but I would contend that insofar as a person could use a title to make a transaction in which neither party produced or consumed the goods, the title was effectively currency. If you obtained a title to a pile of grain in payment for a quantity of masonry work, and you use that title to obtain a horse, the substance of the title is abstract, and the value is determined only by faith in its existence and integrity.
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Somebody gets it. :thumbsup:
 
bruto said:
Up until relatively recently US greenbacks were "silver certificates" and were actually redeemable in silver. When the government ended this, there was a deadline for holders of silver certificates to get their silver, and many did. They cashed in their bills for actual, little bags of raw silver. Yet most people would consider that although the issuance and redemption of those certificates might qualify them as barter, they served as money in between times.
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Wasn't all that recent.

About 50 years ago my brother and I accumulated silver certificates, flew down to NY, and waited in line at the assay office where they doled out the bags of silver nodules. There was a fairly long line but that was just a few days before the redemption period ended. After that no redemption. It was fun. No idea what we ever did with the silver but it was from about $200 of certs.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
I'm not demonizing money.
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Don't complicate things by falling into xjx388's trap. His argument is extremely simple: Capitalism is good because it's human nature, it's what humans want:

xjx388 said:
Demonize money all you want, but it’s really just a symbol for the basic human desire to be free.
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However, when capitalism turns out to be pretty bad, for instance when it makes people spread a virus, instead of containing it and stamping it out, it has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with the imperfection of humans. It's just human nature:

xjx388 said:
Well, I didn’t say money was the be all end all of freedom. Like humanity itself, money is imperfect.
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By the way, you are wrong when you think that:
Roger Ramjets said:
Money is a useful invention.
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1) Money isn't really an invention.
2) And when people think of money as useful, they don't notice what it is useful for. The idea is to imagine capitalism as the natural state of things, human, as xjx388 likes to imagine, and then consider how you would go about buying a loaf of bread without money: You couldn't do it, of course.
3) That is what is so brilliant about the money ideology: Commodities come with a price tag = the amount of money that you have to pay for it. Bread as such doesn't. That is the whole point of money in capitalism: You may have an abundance of bread on one side, and empty stomachs on the other. Money is the thing that prevents stomachs to be filled because the purpose of production in capitalism isn't to fulfill needs, it's to earn money.
4) The purpose of money is to ensure the enrichment of one class at the expense of the others. Money's usefulness is to one class only. Money is a relationship of a very particular kind. It's what separates the poor from the things they need.

Chapter One: Commodities
Chapter Two: Exchange
Chapter Three: Money, Or the Circulation of Commodities
 
I think discussion of the misuses of money and the sins of capitalism, while worth noting, don't really explain why money exists, or what we would do without it.

Things generally do have an intrinsic value relative to other things. Bread doesn't just fall out of the sky. People procure ingredients and perform a task, and the result of this task is bread, and if the makers of bread want to subsist, they must exchange the bread for the other things of value that they have foregone because they were busy making bread.

I'm not sure why one would say that money isn't an invention. It is not a discovery. Someone somewhere came up with the idea of a token of value that could be exchanged without reference to a specific object of value, which would allow people to make complicated transactions without keeping track of the source of value. I can imagine that this might have occurred gradually, as an outcome of a barter system such as the Egyptian one, in which, as populations grew and became less intimate, the core object of value became more and more abstract. Currency is based on the faith that it will retain a certain value without continually referring back to what it is based on. If you have a title worth a pile of grain, and if that gets you a grain-pile's worth of goods from someone who has reason to believe he can use it to get a grain-pile's worth of something else, the grain eventually becomes itself a matter of faith. It would finish the transition to currency if, when someone comes back to the granary with the title, the person running the granary said "sorry, rats ate that pile, but here's an equivalent pile."

Of course as capitalism (or any other system for that matter) is usually practiced, all sorts of sins can occur, and among other things, we end up with poverty and wealth. But to suggest that, for example, bread does not have some economic value suggests that the person who makes it is not entitled to anything in return, or that, at best, the rate of exchange would be arbitrary and capricious.

And the theorists of a no-money economy still have not figured out, as far as I can see, how in a no-money economy I can ever hope to get new brake rotors for my Hyundai.
 
bruto said:
[snipped for brevity]

And the theorists of a no-money economy still have not figured out, as far as I can see, how in a no-money economy I can ever hope to get new brake rotors for my Hyundai.
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That'll be half a cow, on the hoof. No refunds, but we'll help you load the other half to take home.
 
bruto said:
I think discussion of the misuses of money and the sins of capitalism, while worth noting, don't really explain why money exists, or what we would do without it.

Things generally do have an intrinsic value relative to other things. Bread doesn't just fall out of the sky. People procure ingredients and perform a task, and the result of this task is bread, and if the makers of bread want to subsist, they must exchange the bread for the other things of value that they have foregone because they were busy making bread.

I'm not sure why one would say that money isn't an invention. It is not a discovery. Someone somewhere came up with the idea of a token of value that could be exchanged without reference to a specific object of value, which would allow people to make complicated transactions without keeping track of the source of value. I can imagine that this might have occurred gradually, as an outcome of a barter system such as the Egyptian one, in which, as populations grew and became less intimate, the core object of value became more and more abstract. Currency is based on the faith that it will retain a certain value without continually referring back to what it is based on. If you have a title worth a pile of grain, and if that gets you a grain-pile's worth of goods from someone who has reason to believe he can use it to get a grain-pile's worth of something else, the grain eventually becomes itself a matter of faith. It would finish the transition to currency if, when someone comes back to the granary with the title, the person running the granary said "sorry, rats ate that pile, but here's an equivalent pile."

Of course as capitalism (or any other system for that matter) is usually practiced, all sorts of sins can occur, and among other things, we end up with poverty and wealth. But to suggest that, for example, bread does not have some economic value suggests that the person who makes it is not entitled to anything in return, or that, at best, the rate of exchange would be arbitrary and capricious.

And the theorists of a no-money economy still have not figured out, as far as I can see, how in a no-money economy I can ever hope to get new brake rotors for my Hyundai.
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That's because in their no money economy you wouldn't need a Hyundai. The state would provide everything - food and a place to eat it, clothes and a place to wash them. a bed and a room to put it in, a job and transport there and back...sound familiar?
 
Lplus said:
That's because in their no money economy you wouldn't need a Hyundai. The state would provide everything - food and a place to eat it, clothes and a place to wash them. a bed and a room to put it in, a job and transport there and back...sound familiar?
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TRue, and of course I couldn't buy a Hyundai anyway, because we've always been at war with Eastasia!
 
bruto said:
I'm not sure why one would say that money isn't an invention. It is not a discovery.
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Much like slavery is neither a discovery nor an invention.

Someone somewhere came up with the idea of a token of value that could be exchanged without reference to a specific object of value, which would allow people to make complicated transactions without keeping track of the source of value.
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No, not really. Not at all, actually. It's the Scrooge McDuck bottle cap theory of money, and it isn't true, sorry: Tralla La. Gold and silver weren't mere tokens of value. They contained value. Not as a physical but as a social property. For this reason they were accepted as "value that could be exchanged", not because somebody had an idea. Value is explained in Chapter one: Commodities.

I can imagine that this might have occurred gradually, as an outcome of a barter system such as the Egyptian one, in which, as populations grew and became less intimate, the core object of value became more and more abstract.
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Much better, but notice that "might have occurred gradually" contradicts "Someone somewhere came up with the idea."

Currency is based on the faith that it will retain a certain value without continually referring back to what it is based on. If you have a title worth a pile of grain, and if that gets you a grain-pile's worth of goods from someone who has reason to believe he can use it to get a grain-pile's worth of something else, the grain eventually becomes itself a matter of faith.
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You introduce worth (= value) without explaining what makes it worth anything at all.
But yes, something that is worth something can be used to get something that is worth something, too, but again you ignore value and worth and in the end you're back with Scrooge McDuck's bottle caps. And that is not what money is. Money isn't faith. Worth isn't faith. Value isn't faith. See: Chapter one: Commodities.

It would finish the transition to currency if, when someone comes back to the granary with the title, the person running the granary said "sorry, rats ate that pile, but here's an equivalent pile."
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Not in any granary I ever heard of. The transition from gold or silver to paper money, first actual bank notes, then modern national currencies is a long and difficult one, and it goes through the stage of being IOUs based on silver and gold: This piece of paper is worths so and so much silver or gold. Leaving to gold standard required actual world domination. Not faith.

Of course as capitalism (or any other system for that matter) is usually practiced, all sorts of sins can occur, and among other things, we end up with poverty and wealth. But to suggest that, for example, bread does not have some economic value suggests that the person who makes it is not entitled to anything in return, or that, at best, the rate of exchange would be arbitrary and capricious.
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I can't imagine anyone would claim "that, for example, bread does not have some economic value." Entitlement so something in return implies the market economy much the same way that "the rate of exchange" implies the existence of money.

And the theorists of a no-money economy still have not figured out, as far as I can see, how in a no-money economy I can ever hope to get new brake rotors for my Hyundai.
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Do you think this might be because your Hyundai is produced by capitalism? 'Can I have another cup of coffee?' requires paying up front in one circumstance, not in all of them.

That you can't get new brake rotors for your car without paying doesn't prove that that is the only way that brake rotors could be produced and distributed. But in the particular circumstances you find yourself in, the market economy, capitalism, that is the only way to get them.

And if you can't pay, you have to live without them. Like I said. The price is what stands between you and the rotor blades since they are private property and as such belong to somebody else, the owners of Hyundai - unlike your Hyundai, which you bought from them as a commodity:
Chapter Three: Money, Or the Circulation of Commodities
 
dann said:
Much like slavery is neither a discovery nor an invention.




No, not really. Not at all, actually. It's the Scrooge McDuck bottle cap theory of money, and it isn't true, sorry: Tralla La. Gold and silver weren't mere tokens of value. They contained value. Not as a physical but as a social property. For this reason they were accepted as "value that could be exchanged", not because somebody had an idea. Value is explained in Chapter one: Commodities.




Much better, but notice that "might have occurred gradually" contradicts "Someone somewhere came up with the idea."




You introduce worth (= value) without explaining what makes it worth anything at all.
But yes, something that is worth something can be used to get something that is worth something, too, but again you ignore value and worth and in the end you're back with Scrooge McDuck's bottle caps. And that is not what money is. Money isn't faith. Worth isn't faith. Value isn't faith. See: Chapter one: Commodities.




Not in any granary I ever heard of. The transition from gold or silver to paper money, first actual bank notes, then modern national currencies is a long and difficult one, and it goes through the stage of being IOUs based on silver and gold: This piece of paper is worths so and so much silver or gold. Leaving to gold standard required actual world domination. Not faith.




I can't imagine anyone would claim "that, for example, bread does not have some economic value." Entitlement so something in return implies the market economy much the same way that "the rate of exchange" implies the existence of money.




Do you think this might be because your Hyundai is produced by capitalism? 'Can I have another cup of coffee?' requires paying up front in one circumstance, not in all of them.

That you can't get new brake rotors for your car without paying doesn't prove that that is the only way that brake rotors could be produced and distributed. But in the particular circumstances you find yourself in, the market economy, capitalism, that is the only way to get them.

And if you can't pay, you have to live without them. Like I said. The price is what stands between you and the rotor blades since they are private property and as such belong to somebody else, the owners of Hyundai - unlike your Hyundai, which you bought from them as a commodity:
Chapter Three: Money, Or the Circulation of Commodities
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To each according to his need for brake rotors, from each according to his ability to make brake rotors....
 
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