Message:
   Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 22:39:30 -0500
   From: calsch <calsch@mail.montana.com>
   Subject: Commodity Money Info

Walt mentioned tobacco as use for money in the Virginias. Likewise alcohol has been used. I have wondered whether Gesell learned that the Inca Indians had used the cocoa bean as money for centuries. (Gesell had spent some years in Argentina.) All of these items are consumables themselves and have holding costs and self life thereby reflecting on the items they were traded for in a positive way. I know nothing about tobacco, but suspect that temperature and humidity need to be controlled or the product degenerates. Alcohol looses credibility the further it gets from the still because it is likely to be sampled and watered down.

Because each of these items can be created by people who are also likely to be able to create other things, and all of them have storage loss of their own, they do serve well as currency.

Walt has pointed out that to use only gold as a commodity money is to automatically create a privileged class of brokers in the one commodity.

Also, an old rancher down in southwest Idaho pointed out to me twenty years ago that the idea of going back to gold was a trap practically guaranteeing that everybody becomes thoroughly enslaved to the guys who have it now. He said that most of the gold was still in the hands of the central banks.

Lietaer said in his book "The Future of Money" that belief in the value of money was actually a belief about other people's belief. In other words, you believe a given money has value because you believe other people believe it has value.

Amazing how much of this stuff is imaginary. Like believing in an imaginary government god with whole groups of priests administrating to the needs of this god. (bureaucrats) And the idea that this government god has the right to create synthetic persons who live forever (corporations) and set up a debt money system where everyone becomes enslaved to the government god and his army of synthetic persons.

We the living enslaved to imaginary gods and synthetic persons! And we maintain our own shackles!

Cal