***>Yes, times change and the meaning of words change. Join the 21st century. <***
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism...The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever...When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable.
George Orwell http://www.geocities.com/socredus/compendium/orwell.txt --
On 11 Sep 2003 07:23:40 -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bill Ryan) wrote:
"Money that is not convertible into anything else -- which therefore defines what we mean by 'real money' -- is called 'definitive money'. This role was once played by gold. Today it is played by Fed dollars [Federal Reserve notes and deposits at the Fed] which are a sort of 'artificial gold,' created by the government. The provision of definitive money is today a normal function of most central banks. Money of this type, which exists by government order or fiat alone, is called 'fiat money.'" Meir Kohn, Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College, -------------------------------------------------
This is merely how Professor Kohn defines it. It's not how it was defined in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which is my point.
Yes, times change and the meaning of words change. Join the 21st century. --
To put the above into context. I am having a continuing discussion with William Hummel, an economics hobbyist who is a prolific defender of Warren Mosler's economic theories.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the era of intense debate between the Greenbackers and Populists, on the one side, and the bankers on the other--in their propaganda the bankers derisively applied the term "fiat" to the money printed and spent into circulation by the federal government. The greenbacks were backed by "nothing" (which of course was a lie). After all, the banker "hard" money was backed by "gold" and "real bills." Their money was "real" money. The government money was a "fraud."
Now they have succeeded in eliminating the greenbacks totally so that bank credit has become the monopoly money. Yet that money has become "fiat" in the modern parlance. Yes, it has become that but the locus of the "fiat" is at the Fed, not Treasury, which has become stripped of its financial independence.
The Moslerites would have us believe otherwise.
Bill
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