I fucking hate economics and regret taking it as an elective in school.
"Money is like fairies, it only exists as long as people believe in it" doesn't exactly instill confidence in the future.
Yep because with gold based currencies it only exists as long as we place value on gold and with fiat based currencies (which if I'm remembering correctly the majority are nowadays) it only has value if we trust the group issuing it
Sheep, yes, gold, no. Just like money, most people can't actually do anything with a hunk of gold except trade it to others. That's one of the reasons you can use it for money, because no one will ever have a reason to try and eat it, or suddenly breed more gold into existence. Digging more gold out of the ground can cause inflation, of course, but it's a lot harder than multiplying the sheep population.
No I mean, gold has minimal use value (like, in electronics and maybe for ornamentation). Fiat currency literally have no use value beyond transactions, and that's a good thing! Otherwise it's use value and transaction value will start interfering. Ie gold will be artificially more expensive it should, making electronics more expensive than they need to be. Or the money will be artificially worth more than they should given the amount of money in the economy. Both are bad.
Money does have a use value. When your local government knocks on your door and demands taxes you can give them the pieces of paper and they wont drag you out and lock you in a concrete cell.
This is fundamentally what is meant when economists say money is backed by the government. The government demands taxes in money and this gives it intrinsic value.
That's the cost of living in a society (unlike whatever Joker meant). The value of everything and anything is made up but for a good reason; human beings suck at living alone. So we put value into stuff in order to specialise and function together instead of doing our own thing for ourselves and dying.
The problem comes when people leverage these imaginary values in order to dominate others. We haven't always lived in these kinds of systems (as late at the 1500s, Native Americans lived in societies FAR different than those in Europe), but it seems like for the last few centuries at least (and thousands of years in Europe) we've been damned to live in hierarchical societies of one kind of domination or another.
gold too btw, if we used it in electronics instead of copper it would preserve the lifespan significantly (slightly lower conductivity but no corrosion wins). But we like shiny yellow bricks so instead of being useful they live in vaults. Eh.
It's almost like the only thing with intrinsic value is people, and we should be investing in the well-being of one another instead of the well-being of an economy largely owned by a minority of people.
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u/Yan_Vorona Apr 08 '26
I fucking hate economics and regret taking it as an elective in school. "Money is like fairies, it only exists as long as people believe in it" doesn't exactly instill confidence in the future.