Re: two currencies and Korean war

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Barkley wrote:

> BTW, I have been aware of this personally.  As
> recently as 20 years ago, M-T dollars were still being
> used by bedouins in the desert of Sa'udi Arabia as a
> medium of exchange.  The Badu were very aware at
> all times of the world price of silver.
> OTOH, one for
> the chartalists, I suspect they were usable to pay taxes
> there as the Sa'udis were very into silver and some of
> them would lose huge sums when the silver bubble
> burst.  The Qur'an asserts that money should be specie
> and the Sa'udi paper money has silver threads in it.
> The Hunt brothers had convinced some of them that
> the world would go on a silver standard.  The current
> de facto leader, Crown Prince Abdullah reputedly lost
> several billion dollars in the crash.

These facts contradict "chartalism" in the sense of the claim that the value
of money as a store of wealth derives ultimately from the tax requirement,
don't they?  The valuation of silver by the Sa'udis and the bedouins didn't
derive from its use for paying taxes, rather this use derived from its
valuation which, as the connection with the Qur'an indicates, had another
basis.

My understanding is that blood feuds, jus talionis, blood money and bride
price are still characteristic of many Middle Eastern cultures. As I pointed
out earlier, in the psychology consistent with the psychological premises of
Keynes's monetary theory these phenomena are expressions of the same
persecutory anxiety as the "strong irrational feelings" about money to which
Keynes points as the ultimate basis of the "desire to hold money as a store
of wealth".

Ted