Paul Cockshott wrote: > I agree that the Krona has a forced circulation, and that the requirement to > pay taxes in Krona is important, but why is a Krona worth only about 20 > seconds of labour not an hour of labour for example?
in the case where the artificial scarcity of an item is enforced, the actual price or exchange-value is arbitrary (especially since the state and its central bank don't maximize profits) except that they can't be lower than the value. > This has to be a matter of the number of hours labour purchased by the state > and the number of Krona offered in return to state servants. > If the state decided that it would pay state servants on average 1 krona per > ten seconds labour, I hold that the Krona would devalue from its present > value. > I agree that the Krona has an exchange rate in terms of dollars, but I would > think this is a second order effect > 1. Swedish labour exchanges with other international labours through the > export import trade > 2. Derived from this exchange rate between labours is the exchange rate of > the monetary equivalents of the labour maybe Sweden should do this experiment... Joanna writes: > But surely the truth must be somewhere inbetween. < the real world is usually somewhere between the theories. > The Soviet Union had state power, but not the ability to make its currency > valuable internationally.< it didn't have world hegemony (the way the US does now), but I'd guess that the ruble was accepted in the Eastern Bloc, where it did have hegemony (That may be false, however, since the USSR and Eastern Europe did a lot of bartering or trade-cum-diplomacy, as I understand it. Even with political power, it's hard to sell stuff if it's crappy.) -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you should at least know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
