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There may be some value in this, but it is fundamentally wrong from first to last. First: There never was a great age of barter, you needed to have money before
by gweinberg 13d ago
There may be some value in this, but it is fundamentally wrong from first to last.
First: There never was a great age of barter, you needed to have money before you had a lot of specialization. The idea that you could have brewers trying to pay for everything in beer doesn't resemble anything that did or could have happened.
Last: Fiat money wasn't something people voluntarily accepted, it's something governments forced on people. Governments required people to pay taxes in fiat money, governments required people to accept fiat money as payments for debts, governments forced people to "sell" their gold.
- kasey_junk 13d agoYour presentation about fiat money is more biased than anything presented in the article. Take the UK. They only left the gold standard due to ww1. But they broadly stopped accepting anything but governmental currency in the 1400s for tax payment. It turns out money is more useful than commodities even when it’s a 1:1 relationship and even with that 1:1 relationship governments want their currency to have official legitimacy.
- cs702 13d agoThe OP never claimed that this is history. The purpose of the story is to explain how things work. Please don't attack a strawman.
- mitxela 13d agoYou aren't banned from trading in gold coins.
- modo_mario 13d ago>The idea that you could have brewers trying to pay for everything in beer doesn't resemble anything that did or could have happened. Why not? Tho i suggest only within small communities which made up a larger share of human life at some point and trade beyond them over larger distances would more often be facilitated by certain nonperishable and not too bulky comodities. We have plenty of evidence for such bartering trade even when currency was already more common. (salt for pelts, etc)