Fwd: Re: on money (in the abstract)

[Paul Mackin]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: on money (in the abstract)
Date: 	Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:28:23 -0500
From: 	Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
To: 	Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>



On 11/21/2011 12:07 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>  Money nowadays may be a shared delusion, but as Simmel and all grounded economists
>  know, even in the most basic societies----small group (village/) of yeoman farmers, say---if
>  one basically self-sufficient farmer trades one crop for another or from the family that raises
>  chickens, then the medium of exchange can be called money. That's a message.......
>
>  Money can be called metaphysical, existential.....like space as Paul said and time....
>
>  And, if that small family village produced a surplus and could trade it or store it---see marx and an allusion in Lot49----
>  then they have created some kind of measurable 'wealth'.......
>
>  If the villagers want even one person to do something that is not farming and he needs to eat, he gets 'paid' somehow
>  That's money....
>
>  Here's more outrageuos pynchon-linking specuation that y'all can pick apart and make fun of:  irrational numbers'
>  shit in Against the Day might be---okay, are, I say---linked to all kinds of ways money---and other shit abstractions----
>  get so uprooted from basic reality that they are----irrational......
>
>  like now.....
>
One possible misconception about money is that it is "printed."

The central bank (or any bank) doesn't need a printing press to create
money.

Any more than it needs a furnace to destroy money, when there is too
much of it out there.

Even our most eminent economists use the phrase "print money" when
referring  to what the Fed does.

P

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