4/03/2012

Money in a free society

When society expands beyond a few families, the emergence of money is necessary and inevitable. Exchange is the prime basis of our economics life. Exchange occurs only because different people have different values on goods.

Exchange is inevitable because no one is omnipotent and omniscient. Specialization allows man to develop his best skills and gain benefit from his comparative advantage over others on what he masters. Autarky is the road to starvation and death.

The two problems with barter are: the indivisibility of certain goods and non-coincidence of what people want.

Since problems harass direct exchange, people figure out indirect exchange. We need a medium of exchange. For something to be a desirable medium of exchange, it should be marketable, i.e. it should be desired and wanted by most of the people. That is money. Based on this concept, it is clear that money should be connected with the cumulative development of a society, government has no rights to control the money to control people's economic activities.

Money is a commodity and price is the exchange ratio, somewhat accurately expressing people's value on that good. (I say somewhat because price is an average of all people's value on that particular commodity, but even that price is still an important gauge of how we value things.) Money is neutral, functioning as the medium of exchange.


Golds are traded in units of weight. How much money do we need? One problem with gold standard: if the supply of golds increase, the price of money may fall, and thus people will be worse off.If gold is simultaneously treated as money and real commodity, then we may get confused. Money's value lies in its exchanging function, not with its physical abundance.

Under current system, hoarding is actually good for others. Fiat money is intrinsically useless, what counts are goods and services.

The price of the money is its purchasing power in terms of all goods in the economy, and thus is related to the supply of the money.


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