CrowEpistemologist

Well, if you charge "thirty dollars" for something, you must take dollars for that payment and not some currency somebody says are dollars. This is what the legal tender laws are trying to prevent: counterfeiting. They are basically saying that US dollars can only be made by the US government, which I would think is fair enough. With our current set of laws, any US citizen could easily live their life never holding US dollars for any meaningful length of time. The reason people use US dollars right now is not because they are forced to by law, it's because they are perceived as stable and useful. If that changed then there is nothing legally stopping them from changing their behavior, and technology would actually make the change fairly seamless.

Good idea. Here's a relevant quote: "Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," states: "United States coins and currency [including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks] are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues." This statute means that all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law which says otherwise." http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm If you think taking something besides US dollars for payment is illegal, by all means report these people. They are all presumably breaking the law: http://www.barterquest.com/

You left out the crucial sentence which setup the context for that quote: "Money is not merely a tool of exchange: much more importantly, it is a tool of saving, which permits delayed consumption and buys time for future production." You can argue that the first sentence is partially contradicted by the subsequent ones.

Please cite the exact statutes, please.

You can use anything you want as money. It's not illegal. You can trade dollars for anything and anything for dollars. Most major online retailers take a variety of currencies. Apple could decide to stop taking dollars for their computers tomorrow and demand diamonds instead. Nothing would stop them.

Huh? Gold's gone up drastically in the last 10 years or so. The dollar has been de-coupled for 50 years or so. My above comment about gold's proper priced based on your logic being $infinity/ounce was meant as a reductio ad absurdum.

It depends on the context, and value is contextual. By the logic above, all US dollars are absolutely worthless and thus the dollar price of gold should be $infinity per ounce. This is absurd.

If we had a free society and the government was out of the business of the "anything" standard, are you absolutely certain the market would choose gold? You are absolutely certain that Visa (and others competing with them) wouldn't create a hedged instrument which many of the world's financial experts dubbed very safe and diversified and free of run-ups (viz. like the one we're currently having in gold) and thus making it far more stable than any one particular commodity? Are you sure? Is this a judgement in the realm of philosophy? Is this incontrovertible? I guess what I'm saying is, the decision to pick gold or whatever is a business decision and when I see a whole bunch of folks without deep business credentials making those decisions as if they are unassailable, that makes me uncomfortable. Philosophy doesn't make you an expert in every imaginable realm or any realm per se. The right one helps, yes, but it doesn't do the work for you.

1. Correct, but from an investment standpoint (which is the overt danger in terms of debasement) you are free to trade in and out of dollars any time you feel like it, viz. 25 milliseconds before you need to pay for something with it. The dollar's legal tender status does not constrain you in any realistic way. 2. I know what taxes are. I know what currency is. I don't know how or why they are related except that you pay your taxes (presumably) in that currency? The poster above seemed to imply before that taxes somehow forced dollars upon us. I don't see how. The two others which are insults which will be ignored...

Why can you buy lots of physical things with an ounce of gold today that you couldn't buy 10 years ago then?

1. The US dollar is not forced on by anyone. Please visit your friendly Forex site for details. 2. I don't know what "backed by the force of taxation" is. 3. I'm not sure why that is relevant. 4. Ditto.

But gold has gone up 500% in the last 10 years while nothing else has. It's subject to speculative bubbles just like any other instrument. There's nothing magical about gold. Gold, by the way, is absolutely "created by man". You understand that you don't find those bars already placed in vaults in bar form all by themselves, right? There's actually a great deal of human action involved in finding, purifying and smelting gold. It's no more "natural" than a box of Certified Organic Wheaties.

You don't need them to "determine" value, only aggregate them. Also, by "technology" I mean more advanced banking products. Imagine your plain old checking/savings accounts being connected to a hedge which is a carefully constructed array of instruments which hedge against each other--and is made available to people that don't even know this is going on, only that this is a "safe" way to keep your money (of course there are hundreds of competing products all trying to be "safe"). Yes, I think it's impossible to get past a baseline currency of some sort, and surely "everybody" would pick one to keep score (and value things that they need to sell, make contracts, and so forth). However, if the one everybody picks has problems (viz. they debased your currency), then they'd just switch to another one. Again, this sort of behavior is actually quite common already in countries where the currency is in trouble. My point is that financial products (driven by technology, allowing experts to aggregate their decisions to the masses) can--and already are--making traditional problems of currency smaller to the point of being insignificant in the broader political problems.

I don't know if this is off-subject, or a troll, or just interesting conversation, but here goes... My theory is, the traditional notions of economics with respect to monetary policy (e.g. the gold standard et. al.) are anachronisms. Observe the following "things": The deed to somebody's house A bar of gold US dollar bills British Pound notes Shares of AAPL Shares of FB Some student's promise to pay you back Some company's promise to pay you back Second Life (Linden) dollars Money (denominated in US dollars) in some bank's account What do all of these have in common? They are all tradeable instruments in open markets 24/7 across the globe. They all change in value relative to each other and everything else a thousand times a second, and their "value" is a contextual *determination* at any given time. They all have risk associated with them, which is baked into their value. To me, US dollars are just another instrument. The US government is just another counterparty. If the US inflates the dollar I don't feel any differently about it than if Mark Zuckerberg does something stupid and makes the FB stock I'm holding have less value. There is no fundamental difference. To put it another way, if there was massive inflation of the US dollar, I'd be fine. I wouldn't lose a penny per se unless I made mistakes in my portfolio, but I can make those same mistakes with any other instrument and I do all of the time. The same is true for any savvy investor (and with technology that is fast approaching everybody). In a fully liquid world, therefore, the only thing you worry about is fraud--and even that can be discounted (to some extent). And no, I don't find the actions of any major central bank truly "fraudulent" when they inflate the currency as it's almost done in the open, and done slowly. Again, this is relatively stable as compared to most other instruments. Anyhow, when I hear "gold standard", or "inflation", etc. I cringe. To me it feels like an anachronism. I don't care about either of these things and I think technology will make everybody more and more like me in fairly short order.

The goldless (inflatable) dollar and deficit spending are unrelated. The government could go into as much debt as it wanted with a completely private currency system, too. Insofar as the Treasury is allowed to sell bonds (denominated in whatever form of money), then into debt we go. The only thing the inflatable currency allows you to do is more easily default on your debt and do so in a granular fashion. But surely the Congress would figure out some other way of doing that if there was no Fed and mints.

I guess I would say that slavery was the justification for the war from the North's standpoint. If the South was not engaging in the practice of slavery, then all of the other factors would not have allowed the US to go to war with itself. The South, arguably, was not a part of the USA insofar as they supported slavery. Without slavery all of the other factors would be mere disagreements between the states and not worthy of full-scale war.

Slavery is fundamental--far more so than any of the causes of the civil war including economic factors, which a true recognition of the rights of man transcend. Our country simply would not--and did not--have a right to exist while slavery existed. The North's fight against slavery was a battle to complete the vision of our constitution. With slavery, the words, "all men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" were a joke. Slavery cannot logically be part of the USA and the South, in that sense, were not Americans until they surrendered to the North. Paul's comments show he understands none of this.

"It is at this point when all hell breaks loose". -- ITOE

I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to say, but Heraclitus' river is very much akin to the "dollar" or an "ounce of gold" or a "share of FB". All of these things have a definite identity (unlike what Heraclitus implied) yet have attributes (viz. their value) which constantly change... Actually, I'm not really sure where you were going with that... :-)

There is no "ultimate ruler" which does not itself expand and contract while you use it. That is impossible. Value is contextual, and the context in a global marketplace changes every microsecond. The only thing you can hope for is reasonably stable ways of measuring things, but ultimately whatever you use to measure is itself subject to speculation, etc. I suspect that "currency" will evolve into shares of mutual funds which are in turn combinations of many, many instruments all hedged against each other.

I have said this before, and I'll say it here: our notions of the "gold standard" and "honest money" and so forth as they were written in decades past are dated. These notions were based on the idea of one's savings being stacks of paper money hidden somewhere. This just plain isn't the case anymore in any practical way. Most currencies across the globe are tradeable with one another and can be done so instantly, and information and transfers now move at the speed of light. A great new example of this is a "technology demo" I saw (somewhere) in which the user pays for everything with their smart phone, which instantly calculates the most advantageous way for you to pay for the given good or service based on a number of available instruments. You can imagine this being done to your savings: your money being moved around actively to maximize its value (which is pretty much already happening). I also have heard stories of people living in other countries more recently when they country's currency was in trouble: they would call their bank (this was 15 years ago) and move money instantly to an account in-country to pay for some groceries ten minutes before they paid for them. The bulk of their money, meanwhile, is safely stored all over the world. I'm sure somebody way better than I (with a lot more time on their hands) can blow this whole idea out into a doctoral thesis or a Nobel-winning economics study, but I'd wager that this new way of looking at money has significant political ramifications. As a savvy investor, my own interest in the "gold standard" and the Fed and our government has been, "so what". Instruments are instruments and they are valued and re-valued in real-time. US dollars are just another instrument. Whether they are backed by gold or not a direct concern: it might speak to your own guess at the perception of the instrument's long-term value, but at the end of the day all you really care about is the value. Politically, the calls for ending the Fed and going to the gold standard and that entire Libertarian/Bircherite shtick are... a useless diversion. Cleaning up the financial system and making it more transparent and stamping out fraud in every form (including government-aided fraud) is all that is necessary (but easier said than done). If you do this then the market will take care of itself, including US dollars.

Well anyhow, this is all just wrong. Please re-read ITOE Chapter 5. Thanks.

Stop. Hold that thought. Explore it. Think about your thought process there. Instead of top-down rationalism you're doing proper bottoms-up cognition and coming up with the ambiguity that is necessary when you don't have enough information. This is a good thing. Celebrate it. It's what it is to be human. It's part of our nature--to not know every imaginable thing at any given moment. To not be Aquinas's Angel. To not feel required to have an opinion on everything no matter how little you know about a particular subject. Water Helen! Water!

What again is the nature of man? What again is it to be human? There is absolutely no philosophical difference between the wings we use to fly being attached with a skin graft versus a seat belt. None. Someday, you understand, we will no longer require computer monitors as we can pipe the signals directly to our optical nerves. That will be an amazing revolution in computers--and it will be perfectly moral and proper...

Sorry, you seem to have the wrong philosophy--you want the Amish philosophers down the hall. Meanwhile, me and my transplanted heart (immoral as it may be) are doing fine...