actually that's a very good point about credit money and war debt. One can trace it all the way back to Venice and Genoa, where the forms of negotiable paper that were the privileged money of the capitalists were basically tokens of government war debt; on through the Spanish juros, the German rentes, Dutch bonds... Of course the Bank of England was founded on a 1.2 million pound loan to the King to fight a war in France, which debt the Bank was then allowed to loan out in the form of paper money... However, the realization that money was becoming just war debt raised the question of, if money was the government's promise to repay a debt, what were they promising to repay with, other than with the promise itself? Hence only two years after the founding of the Bank of England, for instance, during the debate over the restriking of the British coins, John Locke ended up winning the argument and establishing that gold and silver were somehow now supposed to be naturally money (something not in any way assumed in the Middle Ages), and that led the way to the insistence on the gold standard that never completely went away until Nixon got rid of it in 1972. Long story. But I would say that now it's even more so.
Anyway thanks for the comments!
David
Anyway thanks for the comments!
David