[A-List] The Peso is a "Derivative" of the Dollar

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anne wrote:

> But, again, concerning value:  There is no
> "price of gold".  Gold is the price!

Let me be serious for once and go back to my analogy between
temperature and money.

We have several scales of temperature: Celsius, Fahrenheit,
Kelvin and the like, all convertible to one another because all
of them can be defined by assigning certain values to the
"hotness" levels of the freezing and boiling points of water and
then dividing the range into some equal intervals. Of course, all
of these acts are entirely arbitrary. But the hotness levels of
the freezing and boiling points of water are not (I don't pay any
attention to those postmodernists who claim that you never know,
more or less, that is).

I have no problem with using water to assign numbers, that is,
temperatures, to certain hotness levels and hence no problem with
using some unit of gold, or some unit of some basket of precious
metals, or some unit of turd, to assign numbers, that is, money,
to levels of that "thing", or "basket of things", that we may use
to define value.

However, in the above assignment of numbers that I call defining
temperature, the sum of all temperatures assigned to the hotness
levels of all material bodies is independent from the available
amount of water and hence the availability of water does not
place any constraints on the energy we can generate using the
resources available to us at the current time in history. But,
given the way the gold standard is defined, or any other
similarly defined standard based on any basket of objects with
limited availability, we will suffer from the stagnation problem
Henry keeps reminding us.

So, I was serious in asking my questions and they were not
directed to Anne only.

By the way, I don't have the answers.

Sabri