Excerpt from Plato's Laws, c. 360 BCE, on the subject of an appropriate state currency system, repudiation of the authority of gold and silver, and an appropriate foreign exchange policy:
Further, the law enjoins that no private man shall be allowed to possess gold and silver, but only coin for daily use, which is almost necessary in dealing with artisans, and for payment of hirelings, whether slaves or immigrants, by all those persons who require the use of them.
Wherefore our citizens, as we say, should have a coin passing current among themselves, but not accepted among the rest of mankind; with a view, however, to expeditions and journeys to other lands-for embassies, or for any other occasion which may arise of sending out a herald, the state must also possess a common Hellenic currency.
If a private person is ever obliged to go abroad, let him have the consent of the magistrates and go; and if when he returns he has any foreign money remaining, let him give the surplus back to the treasury, and receive a corresponding sum in the local currency.Sounds like they were running a domestic state currency system much like our current US dollar system, which obtains its efficacy via our law and NOT nature; but with a foreign exchange system more like the current Japanese and Chinese foreign exchange policies.
Not a moron in sight here some 2300+ years ago.... boy I wonder what happened??? Where did the moron concept of "money" come from to screw all of this up???
2 comments:
Re “no moron in sight”, they had a credit crunch in Ancient Rome and escaped it quicker than we did. They opened the doors of their treasury and distributed money to all and sundry. We didn’t even need to distribute physical money: we’ve got fiat, but the authorities are too dumb to know how to use it.
Another bit of history: Ancient Rome lost a lot of gold to India (in exchange for spices probably). I.e. Rome ran out of monetary base. So they debased their rare metal coins: i.e. they effectively made their monetary base semi fiat, far as I can see. See the two paragraphs starting “One part of the world..” here:
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sanjeev-sanyal-considers-which-countries-will-run-the-world-s-current-account-deficits
"So they debased their rare metal coins: i.e. they effectively made their monetary base semi fiat, "
Ralph,
imo, from my view, it always was "fiat" or what they called 'nomisma'.
What Plato is saying here: "the law enjoins that no private man shall be allowed to possess gold and silver, but only coin for daily use"
Doesnt make sense from a POV of 'debasement' due to the fact that the "coins" were MADE of silver and sometimes gold, this is in the archaeology....
So what Plato is saying is that although the coins were constructed of these metals, they were NOT the metals as they had NO VALUE without the human imprimatir on the "coins"....
This is Aristotle: "nomisma gets its value NOT from nature but from LAW..."
So to even use the word "debased" means that we have fallen into the trap of 'metal-love' to a certain degree... the metal content back then was MEANINGLESS to those who were "large and in charge".... as opposed to the morons we have today who think we are "out of money"...
I'm pretty sure that MY non-metal-loving Roman ancestors would never have thought to have used the word "debasement", but rather the metal-lovers of that time in history would have used it just like they still do today...
"debase" is a metal-lovers term straight out of the metal-lovers lexicon... I dont have a copy of that book! ;)
rsp,
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