On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 18:05, Taavi Burns wrote:

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 05:03:25PM -0500, Marcus Brubaker wrote:

...

in order to encourage internal industries. The key is that money is a commodity and its value is dictated by supply and demand just like everything else. The benefit of using a currency over hard goods is precisely that it can be borrowed without it actually existing. You can't borrow a loaf of bread that doesn't exist, but you can borrow money which doesn't really exist. This allows investment and economic growth that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

Ah, but money doesn't really exist either. It only has value because everyone agrees that it has value, usually as a direct result of a government backing it with actual resources, or a reputable promise of having resources.

Absolutely...which is why lending works, as I was saying above. Of course, most every government in the world has long since stopped backing their currency with any resource in particular. I think the US went off the gold standard in the late 1800s, early 1900s, although I could be wrong on that. Interesting side note: I once heard it said that the author of the Wizard of Oz was strongly in favor of having a resource backed currency. So much so, in fact, that he wrote it into the story, "Follow the yellow brick road..." Of course, that could be completely false... -- Marcus Brubaker <marcus.brubaker-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml