<I find difficult to support Maurice's view because his views require something akin to what Marx wanted: A new way to ascribe value.>
Elm, I don't know what Marx wanted, but the fact that he wanted it doesn't necessarily make it bad. Not all ideas people have are good and neither are they all bad. Because somebody has some bad ideas, doesn't mean that all the rest are, nor is that a proof that any particular idea is bad.
The big disadvantage of gold is that somebody has to waste a lot of time digging it up. Time and people remain, for now, immutable. Life expectancies are not rapidly changing to 1000 years, though it might be that if they can glue more telomeres onto the chain, the value of an hour might change dramatically.
When something is assigned as money and expected to retain value over time, there will always be hordes of people digging up more gold, breeding more goats, or forging more paper.
It is almost universal with people that they work by the hour, not by the unit of production. Salaried people work by the hour too, because they are expected to be working for more or less 8 hours a day or 2000 a year, give or take a few, depending on the expectations of themselves and their boss.
People think of their efforts in terms of how long they worked to get a certain amount of money.
Mqurice |
