Zeev,
Thank you for responding.
I carry no particular brief for a commodity based currency and am ill
equipped, in any case, to be an advocate. Wealth flows in well regulated
channels and I am more or less content with that. Cultural patterns,
memes if you will, persist even against logic and I suppose that is
the main issue I raise.
There is an inertia to the systemic belief of humans that gold, the prime
incorruptible, equates to values that can transcend the limited value a
currency possesses as a mechanism to facilitate "cargo" exchange. Gold is
a commodity, I agree, but it is also more. Ask any wife what it means
to her that her husband promises never to remove the circle of gold from
his finger.
I will stipulate that you, Henry and Stitch can and do raise irrefutable
arguments that perhaps will maintain as long as vital systems keep
functioning. But where's the money back guarantee? That's the question
individuals ask themselves and when they get no satisfactory answer
individuals tend to take matters into their own hands, and many in times
of confusion default to gold.
With this understanding I wonder about the fragmentation process involved
in the individuation caused by our internet communication system where
everyone can strive to be like a Zeev Hed or Matt Drudge. With more and
more people taking matters into their own hands who's to say that a little
internet mediated global panic wouldn't stimulate the price of gold in
ways never rationally anticipated.
Cosmologists wrestle with "missing dark matter" and hope that a even
a fraction of an electron volt if found in neutrinos could pump up their
sagging equations. So, will it be the consolidation of the collective
or individual single electron volt decisions that will frame the future?
Like an economic cosmologist I wonder if the economic universe is forever
expanding, maybe sometime contracting to collapse or fundamentally in a
steady state of bounded, manageable, oscillations.
You guys are "long" on currency, that's for sure. And if pro currency
arguments can consolidate everyone's opinions then Milton Friedman's
assertion that any system will work if every one believe in it will be
demonstrated again.
But what of the converse? And no one has even brought up the issues of
e-money. Would that be a digital currency? And what will be the analog
to digital currency converter? (This last submitted with tongue only
partially in cheek.)
Jerard |
