Gernot: >> I believe that most socialists are cold to the notion and discrete charme >> of global fiat money because it is not in the books of Old Whiskers. KM >> believed in the gold standard. Gold was the true international money in his >> view.
At the time, that was empirically true. Since his book wasn't about the various forms of money, he assumed the commodity standard as the standard. But I don't think that his theory requires that international money is golden. In CAPITAL, KM talks about the forced circulation of (nonconvertible) fiat money by the state within a given territory. I don't see why that can't be extended to the whole world: if we had a world state (or something like that) we could have world fiat money. To my mind, the stronger the world state, the more it would be able to keep money scarce, so the stronger the money would be (less prone to inflation). The US has been acting as a _de facto_ world state in a lot of ways, but its weakness (as symbolized by the now defunct Dubya regime) is slowly undermining the role of the US$ as the world fiat money. Sabri Oncu wrote: > Gold money is fiat money too, because gold is infinitely divisible at > the continuum level, not at the quantum level. But who cares about the > quantum level? You can create as much money as you like by > re-numerating any currency based on gold. And this can only be done by > fiat. gold money isn't fiat, though it usually involves some role for the state (i.e., certifying that coins are pure gold, etc.) Gold money is money because it's naturally scarce (though of course some countries like South Africa can manipulate this situation, just as governments can fill gold coins with lead) in addition to having other attractive characteristics (being divisible, non-toxic, etc.) Like other moneys, gold can't be a successful money without a superstructure of organizations to make it worse, but it's not something a government can print a lot of. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
