First, an interesting book is coming, The dream you ordered is sold out
what if money expired?
There is an interesting article on money. Below are some notes.
Bartering is inconvenient because it requires “double coincidence of wants.” This makes it highly inefficient too.
As it evolved, money became increasingly symbolic. Money is abstract. It’s a belief system, a language, a social contract. Money is trust. But the rules aren’t written in stone.
Silvio Gesell: money decays over time.
the properties of money — its durability and hoardability — impede its circulation: “When confidence exists, there is money in the market; when confidence is wanting, money withdraws.”
Thus, interest is a private gain at a public cost. In practice, those with money grow richer and those without grow poorer.
“The merchant, the workman, the stockbroker have the same aim, namely to exploit the state of the market, that is, the public at large,” Gesell wrote. “Perhaps the sole difference between usury and commerce is that the professional usurer directs his exploitation more against specific persons.”
Gesell believed that the most-rewarded impulse in our present economy is to give as little as possible and to receive as much as possible, in every transaction. In doing so, he thought, we grow materially, morally and socially poorer. “The exploitation of our neighbor’s need, mutual plundering conducted with all the wiles of salesmanship, is the foundation of our economic life,” he lamented.
To correct these economic and social ills, Gesell recommended we change the nature of money so it better reflects the goods for which it is exchanged. “We must make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange,” he wrote.
To achieve this, he invented a form of expiring money called Freigeld, or Free Money. (Free because it would be freed from hoarding and interest.) The theory worked like this: A $100 bill of Freigeld would have 52 dated boxes on the back, where the holder must affix a 10-cent stamp every week for the bill to still be worth $100. If you kept the bill for an entire year, you would have to affix 52 stamps to the back of it — at a cost of $5.20 — for the bill to still be worth $100. Thus, the bill would depreciate 5.2% annually at the expense of its holder(s). (The value of and rate at which to apply the stamps could be fine-tuned if necessary.)
In his book “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” John Maynard Keynes devoted five pages to Gesell, calling him a “strange and unduly neglected prophet.” He argued the idea behind a stamp scrip was sound. “I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx,” Keynes wrote.
Book: The natural economic order, 1915
Book: Jacob Goldstein, Money: the true story of a made-up thing