Fundamentally, money is real -- at least until we're reduced to a level of depravity and starvation when we start eating one another. It was even real at almost that stage when:
"There was a great famine in the city; the siege lasted so long that a donkey's head sold for eighty shekels of silver and a quarter of a cab of dove's dung for five shekels." [2 Kings ch 6 v 25] And if money isn't shekels of silver, then it's packets of cigarettes as in present-day Russia, or poppy seeds as in present-day Afghanistan. All tangible, not abstract. Credit is certainly an abstraction. We're now into abstraction after abstraction as one dubious financial instrument succeeds another in the world of computerised finance. That's precisely what I've been trying to say in my last two postings. However, I'll grant you that governments started the rot a century ago when they turned real money into paper tokens in order to play fast and loose with its value. Considering the bouts of inflation of the last century, and the likelilood of prolonged deflation in this, money will have to become real again sooner or later. We had a glimpse of what real money was during the 19th century when its value remained constant, when free trade reigned, when real economic growth occurred and when the working man started to become free of agricultural servitude. KH At 15:06 20/04/02 -0400, you wrote: (MG) <<<< I think I should have written "real" money? Isn't all "money" simply a set of conventions wrapped around beliefs in the form of tokens. "Credit" simply takes that to one further stage of abstraction, and e-money credit only dematerializes this further. We can tie values down and link them to real exchanges and then abstract that up, but talking about "real" in these terms seems to me to be about as empty and pointless (and fairly dripping with ideological assumptions) as talking about the "real" nature of humankind. Whoops sorry, that's another discussion. >>>> __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
