From Goldsmiths to Bankers, from Money to Currency, 9

Again, something very precise here: up to this stage, banks had to compete with one another and back their IOUs in actual value just as everyone else. Further on and progressively, the development of banking took the form of charters being devised and required for banking – maybe to protect bankers from their victims, rather than the opposite.

In fact, it is interesting to consider at this point how, while it is true that the idea precedes the intention, sometimes it’s the other way round, sort of, and it’s the ideas – less noble ideas – to stem from intentions – less noble intentions –. Just as everything else, charters and guilds can be used for honest or dishonest purposes: to ensure the quality of product delivered by members, but also to prevent having too many competitors to partake in the cartel. A matter of intention, of basic purpose. And as crooks realize fiat money is a golden goose, many intentions to get their hands on it arise. Supposing that there had to be ambiguous money or explicitly fiat money, then who would be entitled to profit from it? All of us is the only honest option: the owner of its purchasing power the moment it gets born ought to be the producer of the actual product, ideally, or all the citizens, or at least the government, on behalf of them – something that booms economy when applied, besides. Instead, curiously enough, theories arise to support the idea that the emission of fiat money ought to be not only granted to, but even appropriated by private entities. Ideas whose deployment, again oddly enough, ends up relegating to the backstage the basic very fact of who is the owner of that purchasing power the moment it gets born.
What kind of intention there may be behind such ideas, other than that of putting one hands on that purchasing power – called seigniorage, by the way? Before we even wonder how, let’s wonder who: before we mind about the ways such ideas can spread where it matters into society and culture, we better mind about what force exists behind those ideas that enables them to penetrate into society and culture, and reach acceptability and acceptance.