At 10:08 AM 12/9/01 -0600, Jim Choate wrote: >On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, David Honig wrote: > >> First people swapped chickens for goats. >> >> Then they used more portable forms of exact trade, where >> the portable forms were still of equal value, but easier to pocket. >> >> Eventually this got (partially) symbolic, but was private. >> With reps and all that. >> >> Then the govt discovered they could fund wars (etc) by asserting >> their paper was good ---after all, they could confiscate by >> force whatever actual value they needed to back it up.
> >That's pretty revisionist history, and wrong. > >In general the government grew out of inner and inter tribal agreements. >The barter trade advanced until they developed symbolic mechanisms of >recording (eg clay balls that contained other clay balls with the contract >written on the and valid until broken). What did they 'symbolize'? Methinks the invention of writing for practical-accounting purposes didn't change the meaning, that some number of chickens (or other asset) were traded/held. The transition from unary to place notation was similarly useful (you use exponentially less clay!) but irrelevent to the development of money and 'civilization'. These initial symbolic mechanisms >were picked up by the governments almost immediately since it represented >a significant labor decrease in their accounting and storage requirements. Well, by the time agriculture let people settle enough for govt to parasitize them, govt was extracting assets from everyone, so they had a lot of motivation to use this system. Reminds me of the use of Hollerith machines for US census. >As these tribal groups got bigger they became targets for roving bands and Any group, especially a static agricultural (ergo wealthier) society would have been a target for nomadic bandits *regardless* of the use of barter, written accounting, or valuable or symbolic currency. I.e., money made no difference. Predation did lead to fortified zones, though. ----- "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy." -Ayn Rand
