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> Roughly speaking, though, money is an accounting mechanism for keeping track of debt, with its value ultimately backed up by a central government's willingness to accept it for tax payments. This doesn’t make sense. Debt is money owed. So if money is “an accounting mechanism for keeping track of debt” then we have a circular definition. Money can be completely separated from debt. And until around a hundred years ago — where gold was and had been money for hundreds of years — it was. A silver or gold coin is not anyone’s debt, yet it was used as money for centuries. An excellent critique of the idea that money is created by governments was written by Carl Menger in his essay from 1892 entitled “On the Origin of Money”: https://is.muni.cz/el/1456/podzim2009/MPE_MOEK/um/8972262/me... Menger defines money as, simply, “the most liquid good” — where liquidity i, essentially, defined as “how much value you lose when you exchange to and from a certain good”. For example, if you have a hundred chickens and you sell them in exchange for wheat, after which you immediately buy back chickens with your wheat, you will lose more value (chickens) than if you were to use gold as an intermediate commodity. This gives rise to a “common” intermediate commodity, because everyone wants to lose as little value as possible when selling/buying, and this intermediate commodity is money. Of course, this has changed by now, since each country now issues their own currency and disincentivizes the use of competing monies/currencies through various means (primarily by defining their own currency as the “one true measure of value” by charging capital gains taxes on competing monies). |