Friday, April 5, 2013

Lord Keynes — The Origin of Money and Coins in Western Civilisation: The Case of Ancient Greece


Theory of money and historical evidence.

Social Democracy For The 21St Century
The Origin of Money and Coins in Western Civilisation: The Case of Ancient Greece
Lord Keynes

2 comments:

Matt Franko said...


Dont forget we have this from Isaiah which is revealing as far as what took Babylon down and then the Medes came into the fore:

"17 Behold Me rousing against them the Medes, who are not accounting silver, And gold - they are not delighting in it." (Isaiah 13:17)

http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-fall-of-babylon-and-babylonian-unit.html

This of course pre-dates the rise of Greece... but we can see here that Babylon at one point went over to weight measures of silver (rather than authority/law dictating the value...) and that was it for those metal-loving-morons...

Then we can pick up what the arrangements were in the Roman Empire in the Greek scriptures and it was nomisma still at work in that Empire (leftover from Greece apparently).... and things look like they were working pretty well for Rome at that time:

http://classics.mit.edu/Augustus/deeds.html

Seems like once the metal lovers take over things go to shit pretty fast...

rsp,

Matt Franko said...

LK in the comments over there: "The Romans, for example, debased their coinage from the second century AD onwards, yet no disaster happened and price levels seem still to have been stable until the third century."

Right, stable until the end of the Pax Romana this is the same thing I see here.

This looks like where the metal-lovers last took over... and all the chaos quickly followed.... "Dark Ages", etc..

We've (humans) now managed to throw off this yoke of the metals in the 20th century, but I would add for the wrong reasons, but we've thrown the yoke nevertheless.

But the metals are not going down without a fight, and they have their Cainite libertarian morons like Murphy, The Daily Paul people (who actually eat these metals and turn silver colored btw), and even now David Stockman who laments leaving gold in his latest toilet paper book, here on earth battling for them everyday...

So what I see across history (post flood) is that you have barter/gifting running parallel to metal-love for quite a while... OT actually has Abraham using silver to pay for land, Sarah's gravesite, Josephs brothers selling him for silver, etc...

Then, metal-love grows out of control in Babylon and takes them down via the Medes who didnt use/love the metals...

Nomisma shows up looks like (from the archaeology) under the Greeks who conquer just about the whole known world under that system...

Rome retains nomisma and re-consolidates most of the former Greek empire under this nomisma system and moves northwest.

About 300, metal-lovers re-surface and infiltrate Rome and Rome falls into pieces...

Chaos under the metals from about 300 thru the late 20th century where we (humans) now somehow manage to throw off the metals...

Now here we are at some sort of a crossroads... Quo Vadis? It'll be interesting....

(FD: I am on "Team Human")

rsp,