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No market (as libertarians understand markets) has ever emerged in all of history the way libertarians believe they do. All markets emerge in the context of sta
by nickbauman 11y ago
No market (as libertarians understand markets) has ever emerged in all of history the way libertarians believe they do. All markets emerge in the context of state actors, the earliest being warlords that capture gold and silver, strike coin with their visage to pay their soldiers and demand the peasantry to pay taxes in said coin. Markets follow directly from that. They require states to function for no other reason to have police protection over transactions. When you have too much control from a police state, markets suffer. When you have too little, markets suffer (or melt away actually). You will have to do better than this.
- anon4 11y agoI must correct you about one thing. Gold/silver wasn't used until fairly recently - 15th century IIRC and for a lot of the time the value of the coin was in no way correlated to the metal it was printed on. Gold caught on in a time of market crisis because the rulers thought that telling people that the metal itself was valuable it would give them more confidence in the currency. Also it's convenient for currency because it's both absolutely useless and rare (hard to counterfeit).
- Retric 11y agoYour off by at least 2,000 years as Rome for example used gold coins. 200BCE examples on this page : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency. And older gold coins dating back to 600BCE showed up in turkey. Currency was likely directly created as tax payments. There are several examples where some unit of currency was basicly X food for Y time.
- nickbauman 11y agoCoin specie was used as early as 700 BC in the west (Mycenaean Greece). There is evidence that the Chinese minted coin as early as 12th century BC.