Re: Putting Chartalism In Its Place?

[Harry Veeder <eo200@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: "Forstater, Mathew" <ForstaterM@xxxxxxxx>
> Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 14:41:40 -0500
> To: rosserjb@xxxxxxx, William F Hummel <wfhummel@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Putting Chartalism In Its Place?
>

>
> "Any particular seller will accept as money what he can use for buying
> things himself or for settling his own obligations.  This seems to say
> that a means of payment will be generally acceptable if it is already
> generally acceptable, and it looks like a circular argument.  But it
> only means that general acceptability is not easily established.
> General acceptability may come about gradually.  If a growing number of
> people are willing to accept payment in a particular form, this makes
> others willing to accept that kind of payment.  General acceptability
> may be established rapidly if very important sellers or creditors are
> willing to accept payment in a particular form of money.  For example if
> the government announces its readiness to accept a certain means of
> payment in settlement of taxes, taxpayers will be willing to accept this
> means of payment because they can use it to pay taxes.  Everyone else
> will then be willing to accept it because they can use it to buy things
> from the taxpayers, or to pay debts to them, or to make payments to
> others who have to make payments to the taxpayers, and so on."  (p. 693)
>


This implies that if I don't pay taxes to a particular authority,
I will never accept that authority's currency.

However, in practice people tend to accept more than one type
currency as long as there is a mechanism for exchanging currencies.

Harry Veeder