this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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Currency divides the value of an economy. It can only represent that total value.
... but printing more would fix problems if all the new stuff went to normal people. It would give them a larger share of their economy's total value, at the expense of billionaires. The usual trouble is that those rich fucks also get all the new money, doubling down on how they have all of the fucking money.
there is not an item of currency attached to every asset on earth..There is vastly more real asset value than there is currency.
Modern currency is liquid float to help facilitate transactions among items having real value.
Currency itself has only one fundamental value - it's the only thing that can be used to settle taxes. This gives it a lot of exchange value - people will accept it in exchange for real value because they know there are always people needing to pay taxes, including themselves.
Governments accepted crops. Long after the invention of currency, governments still took their cut in wheat. What kind of money is a peasant going to have? All the king's horses eat grain. This obsession with tax is a weirdly libertarian lens on a history that's mostly anthropology.
Fungibility is the fundamental value of currency. Gift economies and informal debt only work if you see the same people on the regular. Anywhere too populous or chaotic requires a medium of exchange - some stand-in for that liquid value. And since it's a pain in the ass to assess variabile quality, all pressure encourages commodification, and only caring about quantity.
Currency is almost inevitable from these pressures. Even functional goods like "knife money" became symbolic coins. If the point is saying, here is a knife, not necessarily a knife we both agree has suitable innate worth, then the idea of a knife is sufficient.
I mean how would taxes explain the rai stones from Yap? There's these giant cartoon wheels that change hands without moving. People just agree, sure, that one belongs to Seema now.
I'm not arguing in favour of libertarianism, it's nonsense. I'm pointing out some basic tenets of credit money. In whatever form currency is, it's always tied to state power over law and taxes. The rai stones are an OK example of it.
https://neweconomicperspectives.org/modern-monetary-theory-primer.html
How.