From Goods to Money, 2

Ø  Fungible (Interchangeable)

The fact that a chicken leg is not the same as a chicken breast makes partitioning a chicken nearly useless; on the other hand, all money units, multiples and submultiples are equal to one another.

Ø  Portable

Goes without saying that in order to ease flows of people and products money has to handle more easily than goods. And money, unlike goods, can be freely designed accordingly.

Ø  Durable

Food rots. Money as an object is designed to endure, so our purchasing power does not require to be cared for to prevent it from vanishing.

Ø  Store of Value

But money ought to be designed to endure not only as an object. Suppose money was made of asbestos: before the discovery that asbestos is carcinogenic its value was high, afterwards it dropped to zero, while that money as an object did not change.

Have we the right to preserve through time the hard−earned fruits of our work, and particularly have we the right to protect them from suppression? Yes, but we must carefully evaluate how, in order not to fall back into suppression through an importance shift from real value to parasitism.
Real products perish, and require resources in order to counteract it; if money does not perish, it becomes a more desirable store of value than real products. This can induce the artificial growth of the value of money compared to real value, as seen before in inducing the growth of the intrinsic value. This increases the power of those who have money compared to those who produce real value. And this incentivises capitalism: lending money at interest, creditor profiting while dumping the business risk on the debtor, maliciously triggering the debtor’s bankruptcy, and financial speculation to the detriment of production of real value. In other words, the risk is incentivising suppressive parasitism to the detriment of what has real value, of those who produce it, and of the community.

The fact that money can be what is called store of value does not depend only on its durability as an object, but also and even more on its durability as something else. To define what that something else is means defining what gives value to money. Or to anything, for that matter.