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| title | date | emoji | publishDate | bookmarkOf | references | summary | tags | ||||||||||||||
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| Moneylike | 2024-10-13T06:58:01Z | 💸 | 2022-09-05T15:30:28Z | https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/ |
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Cory Doctorow describes why money feels so _necessary_, and why cryptocurrencies don’t. |
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Cory Doctorow describes why money feels so necessary, and why cryptocurrencies don’t.
A very interesting read indeed! I’ve not looked into the origins of money before, but Cory’s explanation of the ideas behind Debt: The First 5,000 Years is extremely thought provoking. It certainly explains why money can feel so… oppressive.
Highlights
There’s no indication that coin money ever emerged spontaneously from the difficulty of arriving at confluences of needs.
Soldiers were paid in coin, minted and controlled by the state, which punished counterfeiters with the most terrible torments. Conquered farmers were taxed in coin, on penalty of violence and expropriation.
The value of money, then, came from taxation – from the fact that farmers needed coins.
Coins became money because there was a nondiscretionary, terrible obligation that you could only fulfill with coins.
Every year, conquered Africans under British rule would have to pay a tax for their huts, payable only in imperial shillings. If you failed to pay your hut tax, imperial soldiers would burn it down.
he’ll hold up a handful of his business-cards and ask, “Who will stay after the lecture and help stack the chairs and mop the floor in exchange for one of my cards?”
When no hands go up, Mosler adds, “What if I told you that there were gun-toting security guards at the all the exits, and they will only let you leave in exchange for one of my cards?”
Every hand shoots up.
He is the sole supplier of his cards, and while the audience will treat them as money, Mosler won’t. Mosler doesn’t need business-cards
“Government budgets are not like household budgets”
Mosler isn’t a currency user in this thought-experiment, he’s a currency issuer. Mosler needs your work, not your “money.”
When you pay your door-tax to Mosler’s armed agents, you aren’t giving him your money – you’re giving him his own money back.
That’s why we call it “revenue” (from a Latin root meaning “return”).