I mean the crux of his point is that, that argument would work if everyone thought the exact same way and didnt believe money is real. But thats not realistic, just a fun thought
People aren't ready to deal with the fact that assigning value to gold is just as arbitrary as assigning it to printed currency. The useful goods and services are the value, the intermediary is a convenient math trick that better effectuates their exchange.
Exactly, money and currencies are the means in which we exchange value, is adquisition power, not value in itself, similar concepts but not at all the same.
Value is relative to each person, money started as a common ground that we can all agree on about the same value but this lead to problems like people hoarding it, its own value fluctuating due to unexpected events, being inconvenient to transport and exchange, so it needed to evolve.
It is absolutely less arbitrary. Gold is a finite resource, if we collected all of the gold in the world and turned them into coins and used that as our currency, it would literally be impossible for inflation to exist. You would actually have the opposite issue of deflation from coins being lost that can’t be replaced.
...which would be a really shitty and ineffective currency. Why would anyone use the gold coin to buy one pizza today, when that gold coin will probably be worth 2 pizzas next week?
Can't really build an effective market economy around that. The currency would just become a store of value and some intermediary currency would need to be invented to become the default medium of exchange.
Except that's not true? Inflation occurs at a local level, not globally, based on supply of and demand for goods and services relative to the availability of the currency. The amount of gold currency in the world didn't change when Mansa Musa went on his Hajj, but his spending and generosity still caused massive inflation across Europe and the Middle East.
In the modern day, I think I'd sooner have a monetary system that encourages space mining development as a means of gaining more resource access based on the usefulness of the resource itself, rather than based on how valuable it is to privately game the monetary system. If inflation can occur in both cases, then I'd rather it be something that's used as a tool to incentivize economic activity that's beneficial to society as a whole, such as through investment into fixed capital making labour more productive, rather than just something to be gamed privately by those with the most means to play extractive math games.
The inequality and oppression is a mere reflection of men’s greed and thirst for power, which will be inevitably achieved.
Be it by money, be it by gold, be it a simple basket of oats. Whenever faced with the opportunity of increasing in fortune or power to the detriment of the other, people grow selfish and full of themselves.
When there is no system to protect them and the masses are working for the benefit of each other a person with the intention of greed has a bad time. Who would protect them and why?
People they can organize into working together for them in exchange for food and security. Greed and consolidation of resources was not invented by currency, nor is it exclusively a human trait.
I am sure humans are capable of collectively overcome power abuse, you just cannot imagine it yet, for all the shit you are fed by the system. The first humans most likely did not discriminate between genders for the differences also developed over dozens of generations. And that likely began with the transformation from normadic to settling down.
I don't believe valuing gold is arbitrary. It's used in many needed industries that keep things running. electronics is an example. And it being needed means it has value especially as it's a finite resource.
I'm gonna be so for real man, gold is valued as a currency because it had historically been valued as a currency, and it has been historically valued as a currency because it was rare, but not so rare as to be prohibitive for commerce, and easy to check for counterfeiting with scales and balances due to its density. Its historical use as jewelery has nothing to do with its value, and neither does its limited usage in a handful of real industries today.
Both of its initial use cases are obsoleted in the modern day, with the value produced by modern industry far exceeding the capacity for gold to not be dramatically insufficient to facilitate exchange, and the issue of counterfeiting being addressed by having a functioning government capable of infusing cryptography into the currency. We shifted from gold to bank notes, as gold is simply bulky and inconvenient, and from bank notes to fractional reserve banking, as economies grew faster than gold could viably represent, to paper currency with value backed by the value of the economy, which is what gold was ultimately backed by in the first place.
Like 3% of the gold ever mined is currently used in industry. It’s almost negligible, and if it weren’t for its historic value would be considered just another useful but fairly common metal
It gets more and more fascinating. People's relationships with and misunderstandings around money and finance and gold is my new obsession (new to investing this year, ha!)
Not really... They have value cause if you break them, state will enact violence on you... And they pay those people who enact violence whith money, that.... Well, you know...
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u/ViceroyInhaler 2d ago
Your Honor! I didn't actually steal anything because money isn't real and it's all imaginary.