On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, David Honig wrote:
> First people swapped chickens for goats.
>
> Then they used more portable forms of exact trade, where
> the portable forms were still of equal value, but easier to pocket.
>
> Eventually this got (partially) symbolic, but was private.
> With reps and all that.
>
> Then the govt discovered they could fund wars (etc) by asserting
> their paper was good ---after all, they could confiscate by
> force whatever actual value they needed to back it up.
That's pretty revisionist history, and wrong.
In general the government grew out of inner and inter tribal agreements.
The barter trade advanced until they developed symbolic mechanisms of
recording (eg clay balls that contained other clay balls with the contract
written on the and valid until broken). These initial symbolic mechanisms
were picked up by the governments almost immediately since it represented
a significant labor decrease in their accounting and storage requirements.
As these tribal groups got bigger they became targets for roving bands and
other city/tribes so things like roads and walls (bigger and stronger than
a simple briar & stick animal shield) needed to be built and the
government was sitting there with a perfect mechanism to do it.
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