Re: justice, justice... Was: Anti-Semitism in the Neo-Confederate movement.

On Fri, 6 Jan 2006 01:31:47 +0000 (UTC), "Steve Goldfarb"
<slg@xxxxxxxxx> said:

>In <bfbrr19v42geos2mnvl30mrh8hjfnguu5j@xxxxxxx> ey.markov@xxxxxxxxx (Yisroel Markov) writes:
>
>>>What's your point? Trade is trade. Trade builds wealth. If Village A has
>>>food and Village B does not, you can take food away from some to give to
>>>others but you aren't making anyone wealthy. If you give a check for a
>>>million dollars to one of these isolated tribesmen you're speaking of, you
>>>haven't made him wealthy - if there's no food he still starves, and if
>>>there's no trade then even with a million dollars, or a big stack of gold,
>>>or a nubile daughter, it doesn't do him any good if his fields are empty,
>>>even if his neighbor has a surplus. If he wants access to the surplus, he
>>>has to trade for it. That's called a "market." It creates wealth (in the
>>>neighbor)
>
>>Agreed. Among other things, trade allows people to specialize, and
>>thereby greatly increase both the quality and the quantity of their
>>output. And ISTM that you're defining wealth as "something that can be
>>exchanged for another value," and that bothers Rafael, who would
>>include in the definition objects valuable to the owner, but not to
>>anyone else. Right?
>
>I actually find the question "what is wealth?" to be fascinating, and very
>difficult. But what I mean here is that wealth isn't just "some thing that
>can be traded," but it's also the mechanism by which the trade occurs.

I don't quite see how. What's wrong with the dictionary definition of
wealth?

1.
1. An abundance of valuable material possessions or
resources; riches.
2. The state of being rich; affluence.
2. All goods and resources having value in terms of exchange or
use.
3. A great amount; a profusion: a wealth of advice.

Perhaps, as in 2, you mean that the term only has full meaning when
the owner has someone to trade with? That still doesn't make it "a
system, a process, not just an object."

>Which is why it can't be redistributed by fiat.

Well, that is a basic question of fairness. Is there anything that can
be redistributed by fiat?

>>>Aristotle got just about everything wrong, I believe. There's nothing
>>>magic about money - it's no different from barter, just easier.
>
>>Nothing magic, sure, but it's still leagues ahead of simple barter.
>>Take it from a CPA with a degree in economics - money is a positively
>>brilliant, nay beautiful idea. Its most pure existence is in
>>electronic form.
>
>I agree that it's a very cool idea, but it reduces down to barter.

I partially disagree. One of my definitions of money is "a proxy for,
or a claim on, resources (i.e., offered goods and services)." That's
what allows it to be a store of value. A loan is not barter - what is
being exchanged?

>Trade
>is trade -- which is one of my objections to the prohibition on interest,
>or at least how it's implemented. Pretty much transaction is an example of
>interest - and interest is just a special case of the purchase of the use
>of money, as opposed to the purchase of the use of a tractor, which would
>be a perfeclty permissible lease.

In light of the previous definition, borrowing money is a proxy for
borrowing material things. Being able to borrow $10,000 for a
renovation saves you a lot of trouble borrowing $2,000 worth of lumber
from

Note that the Tora prohibits interest in kind as well as money
interest; it doesn't make a distinction between the two. For these
purposes, at least, money does reduce to barter :-) (not really, but
close enough).

IMHO the difference between that and a lease is that in the latter
case you're paying for the wear and tear, plus a profit. In the case
of a money or seed loan, you're supposed to return an exact
equivalent, unaffected by use, plus a profit.

>>I am reminded of the following:
>
>>"Then suddenly, with a grokking so blinding that he trembled, he
>>understood money. These pretty pictures and bright medallions were not
>>'money'; they were symbols for an idea which spread through these
>>people, all through their world. But things were not money, any more
>>than water shared was a growing closer. Money was an idea, as abstract
>>as an Old One's thoughts - money was a great structural symbol for
>>balancing and healing and growing closer.
>
>>"Mike was dazzled with the magnificent beauty of money.
>
>>"The flow and change and countermarching of symbols was beautiful in
>>small, reminding him of games taught nestlings to encourage them to
>>reason and grow, but it was the totality that dazzled him, an entire
>>world reflected in one dynamic symbol structure. Mike then grokked
>>that the Old Ones of this race were very old indeed to have composed
>>such beauty; he wished humbly to be allowed to meet one."
>
>>Robert A Heinlein - Stranger In A Strange Land - 1961
>>http://www.the-privateer.com/gold/week266.html
>
><grin> - yeah, what RAH said.

But if you grok that, how can you say that money reduces to barter?
Rafael has quoted Bernard Lietaer (an economist, to boot) about how
the volume of currency trade is 30 times the world GDP. Contrary to
him, this doesn't mean that "official monetary system has almost
nothing to do with the real economy" (IMHO), but it does show that
money is more of an idea than a "real thing." Here's another of my
definitions: "a unit of economic information." That's why I said that
money finds its purest expression in electronic form - it needs to
have no physical reality at all.

This idea finds an expression in "Cryptonomicon," BTW.

Yisroel "Godwrestler Warriorson" Markov - Boston, MA Member
www.reason.com -- for unbiased analysis of the world DNRC
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"Judge, and be prepared to be judged" -- Ayn Rand
.

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