The Value of Money is Meaningless

This won't be a long topic...
But hopefully ne of some enlightenment.

Unlike most of my other threads, I don't have links for you visit to present to you certain events, yet I present to you fact.

The value of money is based on gold... right?

A long time ago, Amercians could present their money to the bank and receive that value in gold.
One of the major flaws in society today is that we can no longer exchange our currency for this resource, nor is our currency worth much.
Today, the united states of america printed off thousands of dollars worth of bills... for what? for nothing...
We can't exchange out money for gold...
I mean face it, our money is worth the paper and print it takes to make it and we pay an interest for it.
It costs more to buy ink than it does gas.

But so what?

What if you could trade your money in for gold?

What does some mineral of the earth have to present?

I am writing this thread to show the stupidness of exchange.

Lets say you could trade your money in for gold... so what?
You have gold...
big deal.

Why should a man's earning be represented by some mineral?
Should we all not reap what we sew?
The man tat does the most work should be presented with the most profit...

But even then, what is profit?
The ownership of some mineral that the earth provides all of us???

Does this system of exchange not seem mundane to anyone else?

In a perfect world would there be money?
No.

In a perfect world would man not simply benefit from one another?
Why is it that the man with no money suffer?
Is he not the same as us?

We are people... with thoughts, ideas, feeling, even perhaps souls...
Why should money make one man better than the other?
Why should a mineral meant for every living person be valued at so much to the person who got their hands on it first?

The system of money shows how corrupt we as people have become...
and i refer to ancient times as well... those with the first exchange system...

Is it not silly that man does not simply help out other men?

Do scientists not have their jobs because they enjoy it?
There should be no system of value, only that of benefiting man kind to grow, to live into the future with more knowledge than the past, not just because one obtains more minerals from the earth...

But this system has been present since the beginning right?
it makes me wonder if man is such a creature that deserves more time on this earth that given.

Yes. It is hard to believe that Western Society can be on the brink of collapse because of numbers on a computer. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Money and value boils down to what one finds something to be worth. How badly do you want something, what would you give to get it?

Gold has been used because it wasn't as plentiful to get as other minerals were back in those days. Silver worked out well too. People valued it because it wasn't common. Probably because it was shiny too...

More recent times it became more of a burden to haul around a lot of gold just to exchange for someone else to do work, or provide you with the fruits of their labors. So exchange notes came along as well as places to store your money. Basically the invention of checks... the paper is worthless, but it is your promise to pay this amount to this person for this item. Basically the authorization for the gold storage place to give the other your gold.

Eventually this led to paper money which people would just exchange back and forth and not worry about going to the bank to get the gold. Then much more recent times people did a really stupid thing and made this paper not have worth compared to the favored mineral. They called this "getting off the gold standard." Pretty dumb really as it meant the paper notes could be printed without representing something of actual worth.

I'm not trying to insult any intelligence here, but this is kinda close to how I might explain money to my niece...

It really boils down to what you have, that others value, and what they would trade you for.

There was one thing in the OP that I couldn't quite agree on either... Talking about gold as a mineral the Earth provides all of us. Well, it doesn't. Gold isn't provided to anyone. It's there for the taking. If no one valued it, no one would bother to dig it up out of the ground.

I don't like to nitpick posts either, but near the end where it says "Is it not silly that man does not simply help out other men?"

I believe it is not silly at all. People help each other all the time. People stop helping others when the others take advantage of the person helping. There will always be the moochers of society that breaks down the trust of the rest. Good cannot exist without evil. No matter what shade they both come in.

Originally posted by Odessy
The value of money is based on gold... right?

No actually, it's not. If you mean the American dollar? The American dollar used to be pegged against the price of gold up until the 1930's after which the USA changed to oil. So to this day the American dollar is pegged against the price of oil.

Here is a very interesting article about the pros and cons of a gold standard.
Pegging to Gold and a 100% Gold Standard

You probably should read this first...

Money is a spell, money is hypnosis. Money is what we end up with when we lose our ability to help ourselves and help each other. Money is what happens when we try to own the land, not realising that the land owns us. Money is the result of greed and selfishness, and is in direct oposition to generousness and love.

Money is a mystake.

OP, money is no longer linked to the price of anything, money is now worth what people are willing to pay for it on the international market. people generally judge it's worth against a number of factors such as the economic stability and worth of the country and the quantity of money in the system but at the end of the day the qualities that a currency's value is judged against are pretty ambiguous.

in the normal day to day run of it, in a capitalist society, money is worth the value you place upon your labour and skills against the labour and skills of others. you agree to do a job for x currency paid at agreed periods, you then use this to pay for the goods or services others provide.

in this way it can be viewed as a method to facilitate fair exchange in the system you have outlined.

for example, if you look at a case where a doctor has a broken roof and a carpenter needs life saving treatment. they both require the others services. however, doctors roofs tend to break less often than carpenters get sick and the carpenters plight is far more urgent than the doctors. because of this the doctor is in a position to impose conditions out of all proportion, upon the carpenter, for his services.

in saying that, as things stand, large companies have a large reach and use money to facilitate the exchange of goods on a huge scale, around the country and around the world. these companies borrow money, buy or produce goods and services with it and sell it to those have the requirement, then pay the money back. this system requires a general agreement as to what money is worth and a level of stability that says money will have approx. the same value when borrowed as when repayed.

modern culture is built on this large scale scope of exchange. if banks are unwilling to lend due to devaluation of a currency (worth less upon repayment) or traders are unwilling to borrow because of inflation (worth more upon repayment) of the value, the system collapses.

if the system collapses, it will cause a crisis in the culture, there is no other way to maintain what we now have except through the use of money.

An interesting distinction: the difference between legal tender and lawful money:

www.civil-liberties.com...

Are current Federal Reserve notes lawful money, as well a being legal tender? I know there's laws from the 19th century stating that US Treasury notes are both lawful money and legal tender. Possibly an academic point, but intriguing nonetheless.

The value of everything is essentially meaningless. Value today is mostly dependent on how hard something is to acquire/produce by the common individual.

It doesn't matter what money is backed by and backing it by a mostly fixed commodity just makes it worth more and more as more people come around, until we're all making 1gold cent an hour and buying $20 dollar cars that go up in price 3% every year for no reason while our money stays static and we wonder how we are going to pay off that future 20 trillion dollar debt when our GDP is $1 million a year.

You can exchange money for gold all you want. Just go out and buy some. What you can't do is buy gold at a fixed dollar amount. If you really think you'd be better off with your holdings in gold than invested in something that would tend to grow in value, then go out and buy gold. Bullion coins, preferably, investment grade. Jewelry works, I guess, but you pay a premium.

The thing about gold is it's value tends to cancel out inflation on the long term. Gold is a way to secure value. It might not make more money, but it is a secure way to keep a set amount of assets for a long time. If a bar of gold buys a car today it will probably buy a car in 50 years too. Financial gains have this sad habit of leading to hyperinflation and systemic crash in the mid to long term due to us using fiat money with fractional reserve systems and excessive debt loads.

reply to post by Odessy


Simply put.. the value of money is important. Because we gave it meaning. X amount of material = X amount of other material, trade of equal or higher value for quality or quantity, It would be hard to trade something you don't have so why not make a common ground and currency everyone can own and trade and still get what they want. I don't like money but its a necessary evil in society. If you wish to live in society then that's how it is, if you wish to live off the land and trade goods then do it. Otherwise its something out of our control and we can choice to be in the system and use it or abandon it for freedom