Crime Against Humanity: “Legal” Tender, or The Moneypoly of Moneypulation, 4
Conceptually, you are owed something, you receive something else, and you are forced to accept that something else instead of the something you are actually owed. For our purposes here the two parties of a contract agree freely; if the agreement is not free this is a matter of another sphere of justice outside the monetary sphere. If the party suffering the unfulfilment of the contract is appeased in the freely agreed terms of the contract itself, this is certainly closer to justice than appeasing it forcibly in the extraneous arbitrary terms of a legal tender dictated by a third party. Concretely, you are owed potatoes, and even if the contract provides for carrots in the absence of potatoes, you are forced to settle for a piece of paper and shut the hell up.
Incidentally, this is also another way to reward the demerit of the defaulting party instead of the merit of the injured party.
The various money features discussed above all contribute to let us take legal tender for granted. As a consequence not only we get used to using legal tender as sole unit of measure in agreements and contracts, but also to agree with the idea that obligations fulfilled in legal tender are fulfilled. All this does is playing in the hands of the holder of the monetary sovereignty issuing fiat money out of nothing, be it a government or the fractional reserve bankers, those bailees disguised as debtors, by not only legitimising their fraudulent practice of passing off promises as deliveries, but also shielding it with the force of law.
But there’s a second side of it, too: legal tender does not enter our agreements merely as a unit of account, but actually as an enforced and abitrary spurious third party insinuating, intruding into the free relationship between the contracting parties, ready to serve as a Trojan horse. Needless to say, in fact, the power ruling that something is legal tender simultaneously rules that the obligations in its favour better known as taxes are to be fulfilled in that same legal tender.
