tdh@frog.UUCP (T. Dave Hudson) (01/20/86)
(Note that followups are directed to net.politics.theory .) > The problem is that understanding money as a medium of exchange is > insufficient to understand what money is -- the point is not that the > goods one can exchange have a monetary value, but that they have an > intrinsic value. Since money has no intrinsic value, money buying > money gives no understanding of money. There is no such thing as intrinsic value. But if you mean use-value, the uses to which a good may be put for obtaining further values, even paper money has that. (Remember the joke beginning by asking for toilet paper and ending up asking for change for a ten?) It just doesn't have uses as normally valuable as, say, those of gold or silver. Money, which is simply a common medium of exchange, is not a measure of value. It is used as a measure because calculation is easy and because the expectations of future trade that are based on past trade are fairly reliable. To fully understand money, you must understand the basics of exchange. To say that understanding exchange gives no understanding of money is to say that understanding money gives no understanding of money. (And the implicit is even more eloquent.) David Hudson