You are really good at taking an item out of context, fleshing it with interesting tidbits and then adding valuable comments that have little or nothing to do with the subject matter, aren't you?
Do you understand how to use the subject header in a discussion list? The whole point of having a subject header is to be able to change the subject. If the subject header has a changed subject, then you might want to consider whether the subject may have been changed. Or at least modified to distinguish it from the subject you were discussing.
The same matter comes to mind with respect to the various posts to this list (and other lists) where the subject matter has obviously changed and nobody bothers to update the subject header. It makes the process of having a discussion quite a bit more tedious.
I'm a bit perplexed when I try to reply just to you, since your e-mail address is "nulldev" and I wonder if there is any inbox for that address?
No offense,
None taken.
but what has your post to do with the two items I raised and the third one I implied?
Gosh, Robert, it isn't all about you. Sometimes people discuss related or tangential issues.
(1) Why is it that people on the list like to compare apples with pears
Well, they are more closely related than, say, apples and bananas, or crystal fruit and coconut. The idiom is "apples and oranges" for a reason.
to make a point regarding the fact that exchangers should earn most of their revenues from in-exchanging,
Wait a minute. I thought you wanted to make all the revenues with Phoenician out-exchanges. Punic. Punitive. Hmm? I seem to be failing to grasp the strength of your argument.
Carthago delenda est?
To date only your post gave an example when it had been done like that,
Aww, shucks.
everybody else vaguely quotes that exchangers alwas took a spread.
Right. I think you won't find that the arguments which come from OmniPay personnel are very tight or well-structured with regard to company policy. I gather that company policy at OmniPay simply is.
Fiat lux and all that.
I on the other hand quoted the fact that Phoenician money changers recorded for the afterworld that they made quite a killing on the out-exchange of local coin back into Roman.
Yes. And this item seemed to be a source of enthusiasm for you? You'd like to offer e-gold at spot for inexchange and make your customers pay through the nose for outexchange to local currency, right? Or am I missing something?
And it seems to have escaped you that Rome destroyed Carthage "so that not one stone stood upon another" and sowed salt in their fields and poisoned their wells and burned their libraries and listened to the lamentations of their women. Punitive out exchange seems to have been its own reward.
So we are one all at best.
I'm not sure that we are engaged in a contest, Robert. But, let's say we are, just for giggles. Could you review the rules, and tell me where my team's goal may be found, or is it one of those blind-man's bluff things?
One should also consider that temple shekel were different from other shekels, issued by the temple for the exclusive use of purchases and offerings in the temple.
Yes, of course. I don't think that God issued these shekels, though. Nor is there any clear word that God would have rejected an offering which was not made in the form of those shekels. The whole thing with the money changers was the classic problem of the priest class establishing itself between the people who worship and God. Nice work if you are a priest. Thus we had the whole Protestant reformation thing to return matters from where priests were paid indulgences back to direct contact from sinner to God.
I would now argue that temple shekels were not comparable to a currency but to Disney dollars.
I see.
Tokens that can only be spent and exchanged in a set location.
I think the technical term in more widespread use is "gift certificate money" or "store credit."
Indeed, it was forbidden to take temple shekels out of the temple.
No kidding. What's more, with exorbitant inexchange rates, nobody bought more than the exact amount they needed.
By the way, I was criticizing exorbitant inexchange rates as well. So, I gather, was Jesus.
So, they were in fact not currency
What do you mean? Of course they were currency. They were a medium of exchange. Gift certificate money and store credit are currency.
which makes the favorite example of most exchangers here void.
Well, anyway, if the temple shekel is the favorite example, we can dismiss it as being unGodly.
That in turn means that my Carthage money changer guild is up 1:0.
Wow. Your side is winning. Yay. Robert Ziegler barracks for the Carthage exchange guild.
Jim recalls the words of Cato the Elder, op. cit.
(2) The second point I tried to raise was that with short interruptions most paper currencies were at least claimed to be based on something tangible -
Yes, but it turns out that these claims were all nonsense. John Law's money could never be redeemed for land in Mississippi. The assignats were never redeemable for land seized from the Catholic church. The mandats which replaced them were never redeemable for anything. Neither assignats nor mandats were workable without price controls and outlawing the use of specie. Need I go on? Weimar marks? Vietnam piastres? Somalia shillings? Hello?
The whole point of debasing the coinage is to gain seignorage. You take 1% of the gold out of a thousand coins and you have enough gold to make ten more coins, right? The whole point of most paper money issues has either been 100% seignorage from the word go, or the paper money was perverted into that condition before very long.
which then puts e-gold into the same category and it should have it's own exchange rate.
Yes, it does.
The reason why the Chinese did this was not because they wanted to replace gold but because there was not enough gold available.
Horse feathers. Where gold has been scarce, coins have become smaller. I think the Chinese invented coins with holes in the center so less gold would go further and you'd still have something to hold onto. Also, silver is plentiful where gold is more scarce. I don't believe these claims that there is not enough gold or silver or whatever.
There was no initial plan to devalue the curreny,
That doesn't matter, Robert. If the plan was to make paper which was fully redeemable for gold, great. The plan got perverted. The paper was inflated. It became worthless.
disown people, etc. Instead the Chinese wanted to foster regional trade within the empire,
Let's keep the players straight. The Chinese peasants had none of these ambitions and didn't put the paper money on the streets. The Chinese emperor may have wanted to foster trade within the empire, and he may have had an initially ethical plan for doing so with paper money. Great. However, at some point, the government came up with the idea of inflation, and the result was toilet paper.
but didn't have enough gold to do so.
I don't understand how the amount of gold available does anything to affect the ability of people to exchange value for value. I think what you are probably reviewing is some situation where there was deflation - less money around chasing the same goods and services. So, there was a perception of falling prices as being somehow indicative of a lackluster economy. This deflation probably, as you suggest, resulted from reduced sales of Chinese goods for foreign gold. It need not be an innate economic condition, but may arise from external trade policy or government fiscal policy.
I think there is a valid criticism to level at the Chinese empire if their trade policy limited the selling of, say, Chinese silk for foreign gold. Why?
I have no sympathy with idiots who interfere in the free market and then complain that they need to do something about all the problems which arise because they didn't understand market economics in the first place.
The fact that the system was abused much later
Not all that much later. What's a couple of centuries when laid up against 5,000 years of Chinese history?
What's 200 years to me or thee? With telomerase research we'll live for 1700 years on average.
Keep in mind that Jim Ray is talking about exchange activities "eons" ago which are each around 300 million years as such geological terms are used. Can't even talk about dinosaurs trading eggshells for fern leaves if we go back two eons. That's four eras, right? Cenozoic, Mesozoic, Paleozoic, and Pre-Cambrian. Or, 600 million years if we take my fairly arbitrary standard for a length of an eon. Since the first period, the Cambrian period, of the Paleozoic era starts 570 million years ago, two eons ago there were blue-green algae. The biggest exchange going on was turning Earth's reducing atmosphere into an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.
Now do you see what I mean when I suggest that we cannot expect rigor in the arguments from OmniPay personnel?
> and that paper was issued with no backing does not
change the circumstance that the paper was issued out of necessity because after centuries of little foreign trade there wasn't enough gold for local trade to prosper.
I think there is also the problem of Chinese imperial decrees eliminating the merchant navy because the mandarins didn't want to deal with the rest of the world's existence. So, yes, there is a trade policy issue involved in the lack of gold on hand.
As I recall, the Chinese empire had fallen to a Mongol horde a bit before Marco Polo arrived in the 12th or 13th Century. So, he was able to open up trade quite a bit with Genghis Khan on the throne.
What I actually meant was, when did paper money loose it's implied metal backing. You know, where the value of the paper in exchange and commercial transactions is based on the value of the metal that backs it.
In the United States, this loss started in 1933 when Americans were forbidden to own gold and the exchange rate which had been set in 1792 of one ounce of gold for twenty dollars was changed to one ounce of gold for thirty-five dollars. Seventy-five percent inflation in one go.
However, the silver wasn't removed from the coins until 1964 for the dime and quarter and 1968 for the half dollar and dollar. The offer to redeem foreigners' dollars for gold was withdrawn in 1971. Americans were re-authorized to own gold by decree in 1976. In 1982, the copper disappeared from inside the penny. The Twentieth Century will long be remembered as the century when governments massacred their own civilian populations and debased their own currencies.
As you say yourself, they 'represented money'. They were not money in themselves.
I'm not sure what you can mean here. What I meant was that these were the tokens which were used for money.
In the case of clay seals and tablets, those were actually cheques.
Right. Which means that they were money. Checkbook money. M2 in the money supply lingo.
They were meant not as a storage of value as such but as an easy way to transport wealth.
Money has two functions. It is a store of value. It is a medium of exchange. Any thing which serves either function is money.
See what I mean by very interesting but somewhat unrelated tidbits?
See how I changed the subject header? I do my part to keep up the side.
(3) The third item I tried to raise was the fact that exchangers are stating their fees in terms of percentages.
Not all of them. Go visit http://www.ezez.com/rates.html I, at least, have been listening to you.
On the surface this has little to do with supply and demand. Instead it makes things sound worse than they are.
Yes, but as Adam pointed out in a related post, the exchangers he found for dollars into euros seem to be willing to pretend that there is no exchange rate fee. Then the fee is assessed and suddenly buying into e-gold, even at the exorbitant rates he found among the first few alphabetically listed exchangers on the e-gold site, looks like a great deal.
Quoting e-gold Buy and Sell in $/oz and fatoring in a surcharge (as Omni does if memory servers me right) would do away with half the stigma of surcharges and would actually resemble market forces at work were items are bid and asked...
Factoring not fatoring and where not were. Yes.
Yes, one could set up a bid/ask page as OmniPay does. I gather that many of their customers don't really see that they are paying 2% on inexchange and paying 2% on outexchange.
Why don't you?
I think that my choice of words ('frigging Nazis')
Your choice in frigging partners is your business. I don't see why you would want to frig a Nazi. You don't know where it's been. <grin>
Also, when they minted the silver for the new Reichsmarks the wholesale stealing hadn't taken place yet.
So? Retail stealing, which is called taxes, is still theft.
By the same token, just imagine what Bush could do, if he gave America a stable currency and found some jobs for the people whose jobs his administration has destroyed.
Yes, yes. And if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. Look, anyone who was expecting Bush to be a free market president was sadly disabused when he imposed the steel tariffs back in 2001. August 2003, the tariff on lumber from Canada goes from 28% to 51%, right? I mean, this guy has no idea what he's doing economically. I guess he's following his father's footsteps there.
Of course, I shouldn't compare apples and pears here.
No, no. You just got done proving that here is the very best place for such comparisons. Everyone here seems to be doing it, right? <smile>
After all the Nazis did racial profiling, stole from and disowned dissidents, invaded other countries and plundered their wealth while forcing their local populace to adopt German laws and construct an economy that would benfit Germany... Ooops. Come to think of it.
Yes, I have been wondering when the national anthem will be changed to "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles."
Arabs. Racial profiling. Harrassing people on the basis of looks and decent.
Descent.
Freezing assets, invading and occupying two countries
Really? Just two? What the f#ck are those 10th Mountain Division troops doing in Djibouti and vicinity if not invading and occupying? Just because the local corrupt government has given permission....
Bush is toying with the idea of invading Liberia.
Maybe apples are pears after all???
Maybe the USA government is nationalist and socialist. Not news, my friend.
PS - see, i can twist things around as well. Can we please get back to the three points?
Yeah, sure. Three points. That's basketball, right? Top of the key or something like that.
"Point me at danger! I'm ready!"
Regards,
Jim http://www.ezez.com/
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