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RE: Knowledge of History + Economics = Disbelief in Government
Once you learn Modern Monetary Theory and realize that government creates money to fund the private sector... this graph gets full of question marks.
Fiat is "money" by force. Money arises naturally. Sound money is that which has the most market adoption through voluntary trade.
Government is not required for, "Money."
The archaeological evidence leans towards state origins of money. There isn't any evidence of the barter system spontaneously creating money. Money seems to have started more as a way for the state (or the king) to violently moved resources from the private to the public sector.
I agree government is not required for money. However, that doesn't change the fact right now, the government has a monopoly over creating it. Because the government has a monopoly, we are forced to deal with it. If we're forced to deal with it, we better learn how it actually works if we ever plan on coming up with a better solution.
The archaeological evidence leans towards the market adoption origins of money. There isn't any evidence of government being the first to use gold and silver before natural adoption.
Money seems to have started more as a way for the merchants to move resources from one part of the Arabian peninsula to the other.
I agree government is not required for money. However, that doesn't change the fact right now, the government has a partial monopoly over creating it. Because the government has a monopoly, we are forced to deal with it.
If we look at ways that sound money can be adopted and furthered based on Austrian economics, we can move away from fiat by convincing others of the ethical solution - Voluntaryism.
Can you provide me the evidence? Evidence of state origins of money in the books The Lost Science of Money by Stephen Zarlengena, and Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.
Austrian economics fundamentally misunderstands money, as it treats it like a real asset. It's not. Real assets are things like cars, houses, mugs, gold bars--something real that adds up to a positive number. Money is a financial asset, and all net financial assets add up to zero. A financial asset creates an asset for one party and a liability for another. If I give you a mortgage for $100,000, I have a financial liability of $100,000 and you have a financial asset worth $100,000. If we add them up, it zeros out.
Money itself is a financial liability and asset. When we carry it, it's a financial asset for us, and a liability for the government, who has the obligation to accept it as taxes.
The Austrian response to this concept, as far as I've seen, is basically, "Yea... well it SHOULD be a real asset." First this is a logical fallacy because it completely ignores the argument presented, but secondly it's a bad idea. You can guarantee exchange parity with real assets, because it's incredibly difficult to really know what they're worth. With an abstraction like money, you can set up systems that guarantee par clearing. You won't read this in The Creature from Jekyll Island, but one of the purposes of the Federal Reserve is to guarantee par clearing among different banks. Prior to the Federal Reserve, it was very common for banks to accept notes from other banks at a discount (say 80 cents on the dollar), so no one really knew what any of their money was worth.
When the federal government spends money (i.e. creates it out of nothing), it spends it into the private sector, so the private sector can then use it in the economy. There is no other place for money to come from. What this means is if the federal government balances its budget (takes more in taxes than it spends), it will actually remove money from the system, and the economy will crash simply from lack of money. This is what has caused every single economic depression and recession in the US history.
I'm willing to debate this on a recorded call.
Money is nothing more than a communication tool. It communicates whether someone is willing to perform future work based on the medium.
Whether someone values what the money is subjectively is an enhancement to that function.
This is why people in past times used various monies that had some type of subjective value scarcity ex. large stones/shells, that could be relied on for future communication without much inflation.
The historical reason for adopting gold and other precious metals was that those who had an abundance wanted to show off their wealth with jewelry and ornate clothing and housing.
This caused people to seek out these precious metals to trade with those who had an abundance due to excess from farming and penning of animals.
Adoption was furthered as people realized that these metals could be broken down and weighed for accuracy to trade with others.
The possible utility of gold and silver was more fully realized over time, furthering the adoptions.
It would be wise to study the Austrian theory of money to realize that money is, at its foundation, communication.
And the value of this communication is often strengthened with natural scarcity, durability, divisibility, and multiplicity of utility.
See: https://mises.org/library/origin-money-and-its-value
I have studied Austrian economics, and while I find it spectacular in the field of ethics, I find it utterly lacking in the understanding of money. The article is speculation that's based on the barter fallacy ("Menger pointed out that even in a state of barter, goods would have different degrees of saleableness or saleability"). There is no evidence of barter being the basis for any economic system.
The article points out that a ruler would have create precise ratios between the newly defined money and all other goods--this is almost right. The ruler defines a precise ratio of taxes. One unit of money is a tax token equal to one unit of itself. One dollar pays one dollar of tax liability, per definition. All other prices follow. Because the ruler demands tax tokens that only he can create, the subjects are willing to work for it in order to pay their taxes. Thus spending occurs first, then taxation later. Because taxes apply to ALL subjects in the ruler's jurisdiction, the tax token becomes universal and can be used as money.
Again, open to recorded debate on this.
A ruler is not necessary. What takes place is the greatest good/service provider chooses to accept a certain denomination.
This can include governments, but it isn't exclusive to governments, as popular merchants would choose to sell goods based on some monetary metric. ex. Pearls. Gold dust/nuggets. Salt. Etc.
The money form also had subjective value use, so that is why it arose naturally to begin with.
Never said a ruler was necessary. I'm saying that's the only way it has been done until now.
Again, money cannot be a real asset. There is no evidence of this happening in history. It has been be financial in nature--that is, by definition it creates an asset and a liability at the same. When a ruler demands a tax, it creates an objective value, which is it protects you from the ruler's tax-collecting thugs.
Well, yeah, of course.
In "healthy" economy the creation of new money is slow enough that nobody notices. They, mostly, don't go and say, Let us create more money so we can spend it.
If the govenment need more money, it usually will borrow it from the citizens and banks. Which is in a way borrowing from yourself as the govenment owns all the money anyway. But atleast it keeps the balance in money value.
The federal government never needs to borrow money to spend it (local governments do). The act of the government spending is what creates the money. Spending is not limited in any way by either taxes or selling of bonds.
In a "healthy" economy that's driven by the state, the creation of new money is enough to keep everyone employed, productive capacity full, as well as for everyone to pay their taxes and have enough money to save. If there isn't enough money to do this, the economy is starved for money.
It never needs, yes. However, it does. Otherwise it would not be such a thing as national debt.
"Debt" is a misnomer. Nobody actually owes it. It's just money that's out there. The government could drop interest rates to zero and federal taxes to almost nothing and have no problem in continuing to spend.
Wait, what? Not sure if I understand what you're saying.
Yea, it took me awhile to understand it myself. I've been making a crash course on Youtube for understanding this, and you can check out my feed to see some of them.
Essentially, because the government has a monopoly on money creation and there is nothing slowing it down from creating money (it's a "floating system" where the money isn't pegged to anything like gold or another currency), the only place money can come from is the government.
What this means is that if the government doesn't create the money, there isn't any money to be had (counterfeiting being illegal and all that). It's an incredible blunder to assume that the federal government needs to tax in order to spend. It actually spends in order to tax. Totally bizarre, I know. But if you want to learn more, check out my Steemit feed.
Government only creates "fiat," forced money.
Historical "money" is that which is most commonly traded among a demographic.
This is why gold and silver were historical monies - they arose naturally through market exchange.
Government can create a money by force, but it isn't ethical and it is not the most natural.
Gold and silver were historical moneys because those are the materials the state decided to demand for taxes. The archaeological evidence points to no evidence of these things ever "arising naturally" through market exchange. Saying gold or silver is money because coins were made of gold and silver is like saying inches are wood because rulers are made of wood.
The history of money is that it's all been fiat, as the ability to create money is jealously guarded by the state. It's only with the recent evolution of cryptocurrency that we're really seeing a non-state money, mostly because there is no one to shoot and no doors to kick down to stop it.
Of course government creates money by force, but that's the money we have to work with right now (crypto is too early to know what the hell is going on). If we want to create a better solution, we need to understand how it works properly. Modern Monetary Theory is the only economic theory out there right now offering an accurate description of money.
Gold and silver arose naturally through barter. You're confusing "coinage" with gold and silver dust and nuggets that were first traded in markets, especially in Africa, as money.
"Gold and silver arose naturally through barter." Did you mean to have the word money in there? Because if not, gold and silver arose naturally through a super nova.
Barter isn't the same thing as money and there is no archaeological evidence of an economy, even a small one, operating on barter. If gold and silver were intrinsically valuable for barter, why was it not valued by the entire societies on the American continents before the Spaniards arrived?
The reason gold and silver were used as money is because the state demanded it in taxes. There is evidence that this may have had religious reasons--gold may have been hoarded by temples and brought by worshipers, and thus may have had a divine nature attached to it.
People gathered gold and salt across the Sahara before it was collected as taxes. The barter system arose to a monetary level over time.
It was never contingent on taxes.
Taxes were only a mechanism for furtherance of what was already subjectively valued and used to trade among people across the Arabian peninsula and into Africa.
Sorry, but that's just plain wrong. If money is created by states, then it's because they claimed a monopoly on it by force.
There are countless examples of free people coming together and using other things as money. Or they create their own community currency. It's not that hard to find.
Of course they have a monopoly on it by force. That's all the state does.
It doesn't change the nature of money though.
Outside of crypto, which is relatively new on the human landscape, what is an example of people creating money outside of the state? I know about the communities that make tokens that are exchangeable within a small certain of people committing to it, but that's hardly useful enough to be considered money; if only select members of the community will use it and outside that community you can't... eh... not exactly a "medium" exchange.
Nonsense. A community doesn't need your admission to consider something as money. If people use something as a medium of exchange, it is a medium of exchange. That's that, regardless of the scale of it.
The scale absolutely matters. If I can't use my medium of exchange to buy something because it's only accepted by certain members of my small community, then it's hardly a "medium". Obviously there is no such thing as a money that buys absolutely anything anywhere, but there has to be a critical mass reached where the money can buy everything necessary to keep a society's economy moving. None of these community moneys even come close to that. Especially: you couldn't pay taxes with them.
Let me ask you then: what must this magical minimum scale be for something to be called money? Would the currency used in small countries like Andorra, Liechtenstein, or Vatican City not be called "money" just because you determine the community to be too small?
This scale you talk about is completely arbitrary and subjective. If a currency is used as a means (i.e. medium) of exchange, it is a medium of exchange. Your perception of it doesn't change how people use it. If they think it's convenient to use a currency, they do it. Thus it becomes money.
EDIT: Oh, and taxes has nothing to do with this.
I honestly don't know what the scale would be. People have been asking that about bitcoin since its inception. "At what point are enough people accepting this where we can call it money?" It has made massive strides, and it's still not there, yet. You can't hold BTC and expect to use it as money in the same way you can with fiat.
So yes, scale matters. And you're right: my perception doesn't change it.