Nature of money - part 2

Definition: Currency is the document of money, which is the right to acquire an indeterminate good in commerce.

Law: To raise the quantity of currency does not raise the quantity of money.

To raise the quantity of currency does not raise the quantity of money, but it may seem to raise it. The quantity of buyable goods will remain the same whether the quantity of currency diminishes or rises. There is no sense in a nation raising its supply of currency to get richer. Currency is just the relative measure by which one changes one's actual good by the faculty of buying another one in the future. A nation which has a great amount of gold in its treasury but whose global production is lower than other with lesser gold will fool itself if it considers itself richer. Considering that both nations ignore each other commercially, a small amount of gold on the second buys many more goods than in the first.

There is no sense, therefore, in a nation raising its supply of currency to get richer. But to the issuer of money it does. Because he will buy goods by their actual prices, before people notice the greater amount of currency and adjust their prices. He will buy more so the last ones to receive the currency he has issued buy less. If it is the government who issues the currency, to raise its supply is nothing less than to charge a tax, which people calls the inflation tax.

Normally, the currency has an insignificant value by itself. This is relatively true of gold, as the tragic fable of Midas shows, true of paper notes or of the number written on your bank account. But why, among these three, is gold the most reliable material for currency? Because it is the one that opposes more resistance to its increase of supply. Quantity of gold does not augment in two seconds. Gold should first be extracted from a mine still unexplored. To print paper money is easier and to write a number on your bank account even easier. Gold frustates the issuer of money when he wants to increase the supply of currency.


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Money is the wealth of which one forgoes to obtain a medium of exchange, fungible because portable and durable. It is the unpayable credit the commerciant assumes so he can exchange in an easier way his goods. It is the agreement between the military-political and the entrepreneur castes.

A difference between credit and money is that the former can only be charged from the issuer, and the latter can be opposed against any commerciant.

Nature of money

I've said before that money is a right to acquire a good still to be determined.

But to every right corresponds a duty. Whose is the duty to pay for this good? Of the issuer of money, of course. As money is used to buy goods, its first issuer, who first used it to buy a good, should be responsible to give something in exchange for this good.

Money, therefore, is a debt; a debt of who issues and uses it. Government used to pay its debt in gold, but today it doesn't do it anymore. Government can't go bankrupt, commercial societies can, but government can't.

Who issues money has, by definition, the power to have it accepted. This power, then, implies the obligation of other of accepting it. But this obligation can become merely nominal if it is sustained by the confidence money will be successfully repassed. To demoralize money is equal to not wanting to accept it.*

So money comes to the scene from this strange situation where the issuer oblies the receptor to a credit he will never pay. But the receptor, in his turn, starts to have the right to buy from another; and this goes on.

Is it true, nevertheless, that this right, money, contrary to every other right, does not have a duty as its correlate? Not exactly. Government's duty is not paid to whom detains singularly money, it is paid to the group of people it governs, coordenating their activities Without right of appealing, government pay its debt this way, that means, governing whom it governs.

*Were money issued by a non-monopolist organization, that means, not the state, there woudn't be the obligation of accepting it. In this situation money would be accepted only because it convinced its receptor of being what it is, that is, a generally accepted medium of exchange, not merely the material, be it gold, paper, etc, where it inscribed itself.

In this case, money is only confirmed as a right when it is accepted. Before it is an expectant right.

Virtue in Plato

In the dialogue Meno, Plato explains that virtue is not a science, for if it were, there would be masters in the science, but there are not. He also says heroes in Greece, good in varied activities, and also virtuous, pursued the education of their sons in these activities, but in the field of virtue, they weren't capable to transmit it, as someone who transmits the arithmetic knowledge that two plus two equals four.

For Plato, then, virtue is not something the virtuous person has the possession of, but is a god gift. "If not due to science, then due to a happy opinion? Making use of it, politicians rule cities, not being in any degree differents, as to understanding, from inspired soothsayers or oracle pronouncers. For these too, when gods are in them, speak the truth, even about a lot of things, but don't know about the things they say." This theme will be treated again by Plato in the Apology of Socrates, when he pictures Socrates as the wisest man in Greece, even if he is not fully conscious of that, compared to other characters of greek life, specially ones from the poetical genre, which are capable of telling great stories with extremely beautiful words, but hardly know how they did it; while he, Socrates, knew he was ignorant in several matters others had the conviction, wrong one, they were masters of. Of course the common belief Socrates was a silly man afters answers is not proper, for he showed himself extremely ironical and soaring talking. He kept, nonetheless, a deep respect for the mistery of life.

The philosopher from the Academy finishes up the matter in the following manner: "But if us, in all this discussion, have researched and discussed to the point, virtue wouldn't be by nature something to be taught, but a god concession, which comes without understanding to the one it comes." This phrase throws to the ground any researcher who ever thought of calling him a gnostic. Here he explicitly asserts virtue does not derive from knowledge, for if it did, it could be taught, being though a god gift. Centuries lates Jesus would prefer among his apostles the common men, including two that could be called mediocre. Jesus did not repudiate intelligence, on the contrary, but he also did not despise the ones who didn't have it.

In the Urantia Book, it is told Jesus "taught morality, not from the nature of man, but from the relation of man to God." That means, the solipsist man can't be good, for man needs a personal relation with God. "Jesus' morality was always positive. The golden rule as restated by Jesus demands active social contact; the older negative rule could be obeyed in isolation."

Why do people stare at me in the subway? Don't they think they are bothering you?

I wonder why.

Andrew Johnson

In times the country went
when people elect saints,
he failed to grasp what meant
the public sentiment.

North Koreans' cry

If North-Koreans' cry is not forged, then it is the cry of the slave, which can only give way to its sorrow along with with his master's sorrow. Simone Weil explains that in her essay about the Iliad.

"And what does it take to make the slave weep? The misfortune of his master, his opressor, despoiler, pillager, of the man who laid waste his town and killed his dear ones under his very eyes. This man suffers or dies; then the slave's tears comes. And really why not? This is for him the only occasion on which tears are permitted, are, indeed, required. A slave will always cry whenever he can do so with impunity - his situation keeps tears on tap for him.

She spoke, weeping, and the women groaned,

Using the pretext of Patroclus to bewail their own torments.

Since the slave has no licence to express anything except what is pleasing to his master, it follows that the only emotion that can touch or enliven him a little, that can reach him in the desolation of his life, is the emotion of love for his master. There is no place else to send the gift of love; all other outlets are barred, just as, with the horse in harness, bits, shafts, reins bar every way but one. And if, by some miracle, in the slave's breast a hope is born, the hope of becoming, some day, through somebody's influence, someone once again, how far won't these captives go to show love and thankfulness, even though these emotions are adressed to very mand who should, considering the very recent past, still reek with horror for them:

My husband, to whom my father and respected mother gave me,

I saw before the city transfixed by the sharp bronze.

My three brothers, cildren, with me, of a single mother,

So dear to me! They all met their fatal day.

But you did not allow me to weep, when swift Achilles

Slaughtered my husband and laid waste the city of Mines.

You promised me that I would be taken by divine Achilles,

For his legitimate wife, that he would carry me away in his ships,

To Pythia, where our marriage would be celebrated among the Myrmidons,

So without respite I mourn for you, you who have always been gentle.

To lose more than the slave does is impossible, for he loses his whole inner life. A fragment of it he may get back if he sees the possibility of changing his fate, but this is only his hope. Such is the empire of force (...)."

How british authors love orphans!