how amusing are national currencies?
(Or... Let’s give credit where credit is due)
( - THE END - )
But to elaborate…
Though prideful anglophiles may assume that English as a “world language” reflects not only its utility but some inherent superiority, the same sadly cannot even be pretended regarding the various forms of play money that somersault across the world’s financial stages minute by minute and year by year.
It’s bad enough that the US didn’t go metric years ago. Sure, some adaptation pains, but I smell a non-trivial refrain of “The sun goes ‘round the Earth, HERE specifically” (points to and shoots own foot).
Some things are complex and suffer bogus explanations.
Some things are bogus and hide behind complex explanations.
You think it’s hard? How about this:
You take the current exchange rate of the approximately 180 world currencies.
You create a currency called a “credit” (so cool the way the early science fiction novels used this term) and have done with it. No more scanning of the queen’s face with expensive lasers to see if they changed it this year. No more bent quarters stuck in coke machines. Credits are not “equal to a certain number of dollars”. Credits simply ARE. And no country owns the metric, nor can they manipulate it. The only determinant of its value is what it can be traded for. And the only thing that determines the value of a good is how many credits people are willing to trade for it. How many credits exist? However many existed when they were “born”. Will we need more credits? What if someone builds a starship worth more credits than there are? Can it be bought or traded? How do markets expand as total product increases? Can more credits be created by “fiat”? Doesn’t that make every existing good “worth less” than it was yesterday? YES, and it IS worth less, compared to the new total value of the economy due to the existence of the new starship. The worth of a goat might have been one quintillionth of the world’s total value yesterday. But with the starship, the goat is now worth one sextillionth of the world’s value. “But how do I keep track of this? Do I now charge my customer some weird figure like .9971 of a credit for the goat?” No, you continue to charge them 1 credit (or whatever you charged them yesterday). It is not required that the total of the extant credits reconciles to some adjudged “value” of all goods, which now include the starship. There is simply the opportunity to expend as many credits as you wish for something you want, and for the vendor to accept or refuse. If, over time, people demand 1.01 credits for a goat, it will either be accepted or not accepted.
If buyers from a foreign planet desire to buy the Earth and all its goods, and offer us 100 Goofcoins, we would only have to know what 100 Goofcoins buys in their goods and, if we understand the utility and intrinsic worth of their goods in terms of our goods, then we would either accept, reject or negotiate their offer. But things are never worth something because they correspond to an arbitrary unit of currency. The currency has value only in terms of the goods it will buy, never because of the intrinsic value of some other currency. Currency has no intrinsic value. Just like a “quart” has no INTRINSIC value. It is a concept for counting things which DO have value, like beans or beads. We would attempt to convince the aliens to use Credits (and they, no doubt would harangue us to adopt Goofcoins). Even if we fail, our new environment of 2 currencies still beats the hell out of 180.
Teething pains? Of course.
Now let’s see… you’d have to have pretty big teeth to outweigh choking on constantly changing exchange rates, currency manipulation disputes, printing, scanning, counting (remember “counting”, when your waiter would start backwards from the meal’s cost and magically arrive at what you’d given them? Yeah, let’s make it that hard. Let’s not simply say “I want to give you 3,501 credits. Let’s instead whip out a crate and COUNT to 3,501 by slapping wrinkled pictures of the queen (or do I have that backwards?) while your vendor waits until he can repeat the process to keep you honest.
Yeah. Pretty big teeth, indeed.
You may say, ”but these changes destroy the independence of financial markets and blah blah blah”. Are you fucking kidding me? Then why don’t we have 180 different units of measure? All we are doing is MEASURING things, like the value of my software, or the value of your pigs (or do I have that backwards?).
“But I mean, after all, what if goats need to cost X in Venezuela?” The answer, of course, is that nothing “needs” to cost a certain amount. It can either be traded for that value or it can’t. And don’t get me started on price supports, tariffs and subsidies. These are, as we speak, DISTRACTIONS from our only intended topic: SIMPLICITY. Do you want your life to be as complicated as it can be? Can you IMAGINE a better way to conduct OUR world? (Not THEIR world.)
I am not the Wizard. I am Glenda. You have ALWAYS had the power to return things to sanity. Instead of shooting yourself through those sparkly slippers, take one off and bitch slap the establishment. (Okay, and you can bitch slap me with the other shoe, because as I recall, Glenda could have told them a lot earlier.)
Among the reasons the world has 180 (approximately) currencies:
A. WE TOLERATE IT
B. IT SERVES TO DISEMPOWER THE POPULACE
Just as our laws are so arcane and obscure, and just as our tax codes are so byzantine and INEFFECTIVE, our methods of counting value are LAUGHABLE.
AND WE ALLOW IT. WE TOLERATE IT.
We still live in ancient times, when my trip to Italy will involve games played with little Vegas-style icons and avatars that represent that HERE you buy vodka by the liter and pay for it in goof-coins, but OVER THERE you drink vodka by the gallon to try to forget it cost you 9.37 plastic cherries with purple stems.
And of course, as with the lawyers and the IRS, wasteful layers of humanoids continue to punch numbers into the machines and systems that already dominate us in this sphere.
NOTE:
This is an impromptu perspective on COMPLEXITY and STUPIDITY. There are doubtless adjustments and reconsiderations required to provide necessary function. For example, analogues of the current case, where “nothing costs just a penny anymore, so are there no more single pennies?” And certainly many others. But with digital “credits” it is much easier. Computers breeze through fractions, and nobody has to “count up to” a number anymore.
——————————-
ARE WE WILLING TO TOLERATE A LITTLE INCONVENIENCE TO CHANGE THINGS?
This is ALWAYS the question. In any sphere of our condition or endeavor.
Are millions of parents nationwide willing to suffer the inconvenience of keeping children home from school on ONE AGREED DAY to place the fear of power where it BELONGS, when our institutions FUCK with us via draconian policies, ineffective programs and egregious mismanagement of OUR sacred resources? (Note that in this and other posts I have rather ironically redeployed the term “sacred” not because I believe in any deity (typically referenced in dictionary definitions 1-3 of the word), but rather to puncture the awe and thunder used by the bloviators when invoking a constitution’s “sacred” provisions. Documents are not sacred. WE AND OUR IDEAS are sacred (typically definitions 4-6) because we have value and are NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH. If we believe this, we will act accordingly.