Money at its Roots
To me the idea of stone money is strange but curiosity provoking at the least. These huge stones hold value but cannot be moved, transferred, or even hold a practical value. I cannot feed my family with the stone or use it for shelter but to some they were valuable. The same system used by a group of un-civilized tribesman over a hundred years ago bares a striking resemblance to what we use today in modern society; is it not? We walk around exchanging pieces of paper that can easily be ripped or destroyed for goods of value and necessity. It is true that the monetary system we use today is working and has worked for a period of time, but is it really the best way to sustain an economically diverse and often times unpredictable society? After reading the article by Milton Friedman, “The Island of Stone Money”, and listening to the in class lecture I have a new perspective on money and am starting to ask myself these kinds of questions.
Our belief in money is slowly turning into, in a sense, the same sort of values and beliefs religion is based upon. Being that money in today’s society is basically as abstract and meaningless as trading goods in a video game, it is taken on faith that transactions online that produce X amount of zeros come with equal value in reality. For fear of losing the value of their “money” the French asked the federal reserve to convert the dollar value of their assets into gold. Once the U.S. had done this the French were content with leaving those same assets in a foreign territory. Who really keeps track of all this virtual money today? How is the U.S. over 13 trillion dollars in debt if that amount of actual currency doesn’t even exist? We determine the value of labor and distribution of products by dollar signs but the government can’t guarantee that the money you hold today will posses any value tomorrow. As we create more and more physical currency to match the demands of the public the value the world perceives our money at and the value the government says its worth is ever-changing. Decreasing actually. This is the basic premise behind inflation; price of goods increasing and value of the dollar decreasing. How can we hope that this system will continue to work when inflation cannot be stopped? It was surprising to me to find out that the same item you bought in 1913 for 20 dollars now today would cost over 480 dollars. Everything back in those days was so cheap because there was so much less currency in circulation.
In conclusion, I believe there is a serious problem with not only the concept of our monetary system but also the ethics behind it. Government spending needs to be critically monitored for multiple reasons. The first reason, the government is its own entity and has an enormous amount of power at its disposal. The second reason that our system is flawed is that there are not nearly enough organizations that monitor the governments decisions. Behind all the smoke and mirrors our government puts up for us I believe there is a direct answer as to what the permanence of our current monetary system is. At the rate we are currently traveling now there is no way any rational person could say that the system we have can be sustained. In our lifetimes and for a couple of generations maybe, but every great empire in history has shown us prosprerity doesn’t last forever. We need to be thinking about the future, if we don’t who will?
Works Cited
Friedman, Milton. “The Island of Stone Money.” Diss. Hoover Institution, Stanford University , 1991.
Joffe-Walt, Chana . “How Fake Money Saved Brazil.” NPR.org. 4 Oct. 2010. 30 Jan. 2015. <http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/04/130329523/how-fake-money-saved-brazil>.
“The Invention of Stone Money.” 423: The Invention of Stone Money. This Is American Life, WBEZ. Chicago . 7 Jan. 2011.
Morley, By Robert. “Why the U.S. Dollar Constantly Loses Value.” – TheTrumpet.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Sept. 2016.
Rowan Counterintuitive 