John has three baseballs. Does this tell us anything about how many oranges Fred has? Now that’s a silly question. The number of baseballs John has bears no relationship to the number of oranges Fred has. That is because baseballs and oranges are separate physical objects. We can grow more […]
Daily Archives: September 7, 2016
13 posts
You hold a gun in your hand. The gun is loaded. Is the gun evil, immoral, saintly, good, or none of the above? I think everyone would agree that the gun has no morality. That it doesn’t make sense to give moral character to an inanimate piece of machinery. In […]
Any physical object that is suitable for use as a money is small enough to hold in one hand. Any physical object that can be held in one hand can be taken away from its owner against the owner’s will. I hope this is obvious to everyone so I will […]
From the beginnings of human history, governments and nations have used money. In the beginning the money was some sort of commodity money like salt, pigs, blankets, or beads. But as time and technology advanced, money took on other forms, the most popular being coins of metal and then bills […]
We have heard that one of the sources of the current economic mess in the world was a lack of regulation of banking and insurance industries. Trillions of dollars of bad debt have come to light. The government has allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to help prevent the banking […]
For the last several months we have heard on the news that the financial picture is grim. The world’s largest banks, particularly some huge banks in the U. S. are in desperate trouble. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been provided to some of these U. S. banks by the […]
“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.” ~~Vladimir Lenin One of the many ways that our money lies to us is in its confusing money with actual, usable, goods and services. When we speak of capitalism are we referring to money or to the […]
Industrialization was changing the economy in fundamental ways. The proportion of persons working on farms began to decline at an accelerating rate. The serf or peasant was being "freed" from, or in some cases forced away from, the land and with no other place to go went to the city. […]
Coins were valuable, and so they needed to be protected from thieves and robbers. Therefore, businesses would have strongboxes and other means of making their coins difficult to steal. But the average person could not afford such a luxury. Thus they would sometimes ask more wealthy persons to hold and […]
Having developed government to the point that it was ruling many villages and several small cities, rulers began to desire more profitable trade. There were many problems with the diversity of the commodities being used as media of exchange. It was difficult to compare the value of two particular items […]