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To: Elroy Jetson who wrote (28075)	3/11/2005 4:35:57 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

The Austrians don't believe money is a store of value either: mises.org Menger's breakthrough insight was to realize that "[v]alue is… nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs... and in consequence carry over to economic goods as the… causes of the satisfaction of our needs." (Principles of Economics) In other words, value is the name of an attitude or disposition that a particular person adopts toward a good: he chooses to value it. Although Menger set economics on the path to a correct theory of value in 1871, ancient errors die hard. We can still find many erroneous conceptions of value in contemporary discussions of economic issues. For example, it is quite common to refer to money (or gold, or financial assets) as a "store of value." But an attitude cannot be stored! You cannot pour some of your attitude towards goods into a bar of gold, put it in a vault, and hope it "keeps." You can, of course, store the gold bar. And you will certainly hope that when you decide to take it from the vault and sell it, that others will choose to value it as well. But only the gold was stored. vonmises.org Some commentators maintain that money’s main function is to fulfill the role of a means of savings. Others argue that its main role is to provide services of a unit of account and to function as a store of value. While all these roles are important they are not primary. The fundamental role, the essence of money, is that of a general medium of exchange. All other functions of money emerge because money is the general medium of exchange.