[ExI] Money and Human Nature (was Re: Capitalism, anti capitalism, emotional arousal)

[The Avantguardian]

>________________________________
>From: Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it>
>To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> 
>Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2011 5:42 AM
>Subject: Re: [ExI] Money and Human Nature (was Re: Capitalism, anti capitalism, emotional arousal)
>
>Il 12/11/2011 17:51, Stefano Vaj ha scritto:
>> 2011/11/12 spike <spike66 at att.net <mailto:spike66 at att.net>>
>> 
>>    I am trying to imagine doing that with greenbacks, and seeing a pile
>>    of hundred dollar bills in the trash.

 
 
>The main point people appear to miss is that currency and money are not
>the same thing. Currency is a receipt for money but it is not money.
>Money is a long term store of value. Currency is not.
>Money is backed by itself (there is no counter party risk), currency is
>backed by money (like the gold standard) or by something else like
>government promises and reputation.
>Money is an emergent feature of a complex economic system, currency is
>an imposition of the government.

Gold backed currency is not any better than the currency we have now. All returning to the gold standard would do is effectively act as a government fixing of the price of gold. See how that is less economic freedom than what fiat currency, bits, and bytes gives us?
 
It's actually quite well explained by Gresham's Law which is a consequence of the fact that the symbolic value of money is completely independent of the cost of the substrate that encodes it. Therefore most value is preserved by selfishly interested individuals by hoarding gold and circulating government IOUs than in actually circulating their gold. Of course this is why the government wanted to switch. Because it didn't want to circulate its hoard of gold.
 
Besides gold itself is not wealth. It the value of the time, expense, and effort to mine the gold, refine it, cast it into coins or draw it into wire or what not wherein the value of the gold lay. Just like the economic value of water lay in the fact that it is from known clean source at a distant location and had to be packaged and shipped to your region. All that is man hours compounded by man-hours the very stuff of which our lives are made. 
 
>As usually happen, the promises and reputation of the governments, in
>the long term, have a value of zero. Gold, silver, copper also, stay
>gold, silver and copper.

Than how do you justify Taq polymerase enzyme being so many times more valuable per gram than your precious gold? Why not base all economic value on my #$&$% since after all there are only two in the whole universe? No... Ben Franklin said time was  money not gold was money. How in the hell would you handle interest with a gold standard? Hope that gold coins multiplied like rabbits? Simply do a "currency" split like with stocks? You would be better off simply reinstitutionalizing slavery because under a gold standard maybe one in a million might ever get out of debt no matter how much and hard they worked.
 
Stuart LaForge


“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -Clay Shirky