Debt: The First Five Thousand Years

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For your consideration:
Here's an essay on debt, on levels that we rarely think about.  At least read the introduction.

http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/22/debt-the-first-five-thousand-years/

[Elder Iptuous]

*hasn't read the whole thing*

i would comment that while he associates metal money with violence, and credit money with peace, i don't think this necessarily bears out.
while it is true that bullion is attractive for theft/plunder because of its lack of counterparty obligation,  credit money made strong strides in european history with the issuance of state bonds for the express purpose of waging war.  without this state debt money, many of the wars would have been impossible to finance, and the populace, who was in some cases legally compelled to purchase these bonds would not have had a dog in the fight, so to speak, and therefore would not have supported the rulers in their ambitions of conquest.


Iptuous,
will now read the rest of the article which will likely make my comment look stupid...

[Reginald Ret]

.
I'l be jotting down ideas that occur to me while reading.


Iptuous:
Maybe the money that only exists as a relationship between two people is associated with peace and money that exists independently is associated with war.

if one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach that, from the perspective of ultimate values, material things are unimportant, and selfishness – or even the self – illusory.

Interesting, markets caused religion.
and as stated earlier in this essay, war and slavery lead to markets.

The institution of wage labour, for instance, has historically emerged from within that of slavery (the earliest wage contracts we know of, from Greece to the Malay city states, were actually slave rentals), and it has also tended, historically, to be intimately tied to various forms of debt peonage – as indeed it remains today. The fact that we have cast such institutions in a language of freedom does not mean that what we now think of as economic freedom does not ultimately rest on a logic that has for most of human history been considered the very essence of slavery.

Wage labor absorbs and degrades the mind

[drg]

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

[Elder Iptuous]

Iptuous:
Maybe the money that only exists as a relationship between two people is associated with peace and money that exists independently is associated with war.

the functions of money can be disparate sometimes.
the 'relationship between two people' would seem to be the 'unit of account' function, but doesn't act as a 'store of value' which would be attractive as plunder...
i've read some essays saying that we should really have multiple words for money, and treat them somewhat differently.
if you have some representative money in parrallel with some comodity money, then the latter will exit circulation due to Gresham's law, anyways.
even more-so with fiat.  it only stays in circulation due to requirement that taxes be paid in it. and it doesn't historically act as a store of value very well due to the tendency toward excessive monetary base inflation.  but it works well to grease the economy and curb excessive saving.
hell, some of the best currencies for getting an economy going that is crapped out has been shown to be demuraged currency like the Austrian Worgl.