Mike,
On the contrary, your examples prove my point.
All currencies in times past had intrinsic value
beforehand. The cowrie shells you mention were
not just any cowrie shells scraped up from the
sea bottom but only those of mature size and
coloration. As such they were used primarily for
status ornamentation and only comparatively
recently as coinage. (For about 100 years until
about 1750, merchant banks of northern Europe had
strong rooms of cowrie shells, and kept accounts
of cowrie shells [as well as gold], for use in
trade with west Africa.) Wheels of stone had
great use as grinding wheels. Before, during and
after gold was widely used as coinage around the
Mediterranean by Greek merchants at around
1,000BC, hundreds of different useful portable
items had secondary use as coinage somewhere in
the world (e.g. sheepskin squares in Mongolia,
iron nails in Adam Smith's town of Kirkaldy,
wampum by both Indians and English settlers in North America 400 years ago).
Keith
At 20:26 18/08/2012, you wrote:
Keith, I think your example proves my point
If
the various things you mention "Gold, silver,
copper and bronze coinages" had an intrinsic
worth rather than a symbolic value we as a
species would probably not have come to respond
to so many different physical forms of the
representation of value over the years (and of
course you could have added cowry shells, wheels
of stone, beads and and on and on as other of
the physical representations of symbolized value.
M
From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2012 1:23 PM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION; michael gurstein
Subject: RE: [Futurework] Arthur's 5th belief
The sophistry is in your mind, not mine. As to
your: "of course the physical form of money
doesn't matter. It never has." doesn't appear in
the history books I've ever read. Gold, silver,
copper and bronze coinages (valuable metals for
other purposes, too) were the physical means by
which huge merchant networks (Chinese, Indian,
Islamic, European) traded within and between themselves in pre-capitalist eras.
K
At 07:56 18/08/2012, Michael G wrote:
That kind of sophistry is beneath you Keith
of
course the physical form of money doesn't
matter
It never has. It is a medium of
exchange/symbolic and if folks recognize it as
such it is (and if not not
whether in bits or dirty pieces of paper
.
As for the money "in" the Cayman's that other
nest of symbolic representations i.e. laws/tax
codes recognize another set of symbolic
representations national boundaries and
sovereignty and allow folks like Mitt (and his
ilk) to use their very high priced lawyers and
accountants to manipulate the various symbol
systems to avoid paying their fair share (of taxes
The issue of "propping up" doesn't really apply
to those banks (their liquidity so far as I know
apart from various frauds and ponzi's has never
been in question
Making the world (even a wee
bit safe(r)) for the rest of us through trying
to stimulate demand/thus employment seems to me
to be a not unreasonable approach to economic
policy if only as a counterweight to the quite
unreasonable sending boxcar loads of digital
bits encoded as various currencies to banksters
and (then indirectly) to their political, academic, and governmental lackeys.
M
From:
<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]
[ mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2012 6:54 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; D & N
Subject: Re: [Futurework] Arthur's 5th belief
At 22:53 17/08/2012, Natalia wrote:
snip--->
The New York Times reports there's more money in
the banks of the Cayman Islands than in all the
banks of New York City combined. What's it all
doing there? Avoiding taxes for one. But perhaps
even more seriously, offshore banking starves
the world's economy of cash at a time when it
could really use a few extra bucks.
(KH) There's hardly any money in its true sense
(a consumer commodity) in the Cayman Islands at
all. There are only electronic representations,
of which every last digit has a physical
counterpart sitting on the ground somewhere in
the world or flying in the air or floating on
the sea. Every last square inch of these items
that are visible to the public (and owe their value to the public) is taxable.
Offshore banking itself doesn't starve anybody.
What starves us are onshore banks which are
given special privileges by governments and
which ought, when necessary, to be forced into
bankrupt like every other business. Instead,
they are propped up by the taxpayer by
quantitative easing and other dodgy devices. If
they weren't propped up, then every single
unproductive, overvalued collateral would
quickly find its true market price and productiveness.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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