Monetary Madness

Aristotle, you may have heard of him. He is an old dude.

Okay, so that is Socrates with Bill and Ted, but, come on, if you are going to post a toga-wearing- Greek-philosopher, this is it. Plus, you have another excuse to say So-Crates in "valley" speak. Your Sunday is complete. You're welcome.

But back to Aristotle, he was a Greek philosopher and is credited with establishing the study of formal logic. Let’s just say, he is kind of a big deal. He also defined money. Accordingly, money has four characteristics. Money is:

1.)durable, it has to stand up to wear and tear. You don’t want to use something that can rot. You can't amass a fortune in bananas.

2.)portable, a high amount of worth relative to its weight. You don’t want to have to carry around a ton of steel to purchase a chicken.

3.)divisible, it should be relatively easy to separate or recombine. A diamond meets the first two criteria, but if you start cutting it up, the value decreases rapidly.

4.)intrinsically valuable. It should have value beyond its use as a currency.

Historically, gold has best met all of the above and is the reason it has been selected by the market as the supreme form of money. Here are some examples:

Another historical currency is tobacco. It is not the most durable, but then, how durable is paper? Tobacco does not have the same status as gold, but it was voluntarily accepted as money. Actually, it still is. Think of our prison system!

This brings me to the point of my post. Our current monetary system is not based on voluntary acceptance, but instead governmental fiat. (The dollar is so good, they write laws forcing you to accept it. Gold is so bad, they write laws preventing you from using it.)

Yep, America’s prison system has a more legitimate currency than the US.