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To: AdamSelene235; RJayneJ; Nick Danger; Dog Gone; blam; JohnHuang2
I find the debate over currencies to be a bit out of date.

In the big picture, you want no more than two things from a currency: the ability to facilitate transactions and a store of wealth.

Again, in the big picture, you should want to go to the effort to CHANGE a currency system only if you can substantially improve the efficiency of the current medium.

But where are you going to improve upon the current efficiency of transactions? No nation or combination of nations has EVER come even fractionally close to facilitating the quantity, size, and frequency of transactions that are now considered "ho hum" everday stuff to Americans using our current system. Something else is going to make transactions per se vastly more efficient than what we are using today?! I doubt it.

OK, so if not the "facilitation of transactions" angle, then that leaves us with the "store of wealth" angle.

But the problem with making a currency a better store of wealth is that currencies can ALREADY be used to purchase WHATEVER store of wealth one desires.

If you want gold, then your Dollar buys the ugly yellow metal. IF you want land, then your Dollar buys that, too. Wahtever you want, the current currency of choice buys it already; so everyone can already store their wealth in whatever particular venue that makes the most sense for them.

So WHY force a massive currency change onto citizens? What's to gain? Such a switch won't make any great improvement in efficiency in regards to facilitating transactions, and it would hardly provide a more universally accepted store of wealth, since everyone can ALREADY store their wealth in whatever way that they want.

19 posted on 01/17/2003 11:01:08 AM PST by Southack (Media bias means that Castro won't be punished for Cuban war crimes against Black Angolans in Africa)
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To: Southack
But where are you going to improve upon the current efficiency of transactions? No nation or combination of nations has EVER come even fractionally close to facilitating the quantity, size, and frequency of transactions that are now considered "ho hum" everday stuff to Americans using our current system. Something else is going to make transactions per se vastly more efficient than what we are using today?! I doubt it.

This is more a result of the our free society with and technological crown fire than it is a result of our current monetary system.

So WHY force a massive currency change onto citizens?

Nobody is arguing for that. Did you read the essay?

20 posted on 01/17/2003 12:09:56 PM PST by AdamSelene235
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To: Southack
But the problem with making a currency a better store of wealth is that currencies can ALREADY be used to purchase WHATEVER store of wealth one desires.

Replace the word "ALREADY" with "CURRENTLY" and you will see the same bigger picture that Thais, Filipinos, Indonesians, Malaysians, Russians, and Argentinians have seen over the last 5 years.

The problem, in a word, is "distribution." The mechanism for distributing new money is fatally flawed.

Money that is rigidly fixed in quantity or only gets distributed in exact proportion to the existing distribution (for those of you who incorrectly believe money supply has to grow for the economy to grow) will go a long way toward solving the 5,000 year old problem. It will do so by establishing the only money that is fully consistent with individual liberty and free enterprise: money over which nobody has control over any money supply other than his own.

25 posted on 01/17/2003 1:08:30 PM PST by Deuce
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