A Few New Words

If two people are trading, each one is treating away ownership of some component of a set of conditions. Now, we have just given the same label to the thing each one is trading away. That is what we do, what we humans do. We label. In this case we have given a label “the thing traded away by a trader” to a thing traded away by a trader. If we make an acronym of it it would be, the tabat. So from now on anything that anybody trades away in a trade is his tabat.

When the Romans first began minting coins it was at or near the temple of the goddess, Juno, Moneta. Consequently the unit picked up the tag “money”. There is no reason to obligate ourselves to use that particular word. Tabat would suffice.

But there is evidence of early Chinese coins, long before the Romans printed theirs, which had square holes in them for ease in stringing on a cord and carrying in that manner. These coins were used by traders as transferable currency. They were not consumed by the traders. They were passed on in subsequent trades. If that coin is traded away by a trader it is obvious that it was not the thing ultimately desired.

If that tabat is going to be used by the receiver for further trading we could call that common currency because it is common to more than one trader. If the government identifies and demands this thing in payment for taxes, it will encourage its use. It can then be said be that this particular thing is by law and not by nature. This does not mean that a common currency is only by law. It simply means that the law makers are accepting only this form, in payment for taxes. This is no different from when two people negotiating a trade agreement one of them said I want what you have.

Money by law is money by human creation. Money created by man will be described by man, and what man describes is the form that will represent a commitment. We’ve already seen that in every trade there are two commitments to give away and two commitments to receive those things given away.

Money is ENDOCRANIAL activity. It is not a thing outside of the body. Its representative form may be outside of the body, EXOCRANIAL, but its power is ENDOCRANIAL.

Looking at the history of money, it’s got to just jump out at anyone the fact that people don’t want the money ultimately. Ultimately they want what they can get for it. So the only reason we care about its form is that it be such that its identifying features do not deteriorate otherwise we couldn’t identify it. That is where the importance of form comes in, not in consumer use but in use as a reminder of commitment.

What about that age old question of money’s relationship to a barter? Several economist that I’ve read have said there is absolutely no relationship between the barter and a retail sale. We disagree. All of the components of one are identical to the components in the other. Some have said there is no distinct point in time when human stopped bartering and started retail distribution and selling. Of course not. We’re still bartering. Half of every retail sale is barter. One party is trading a common currency for a product here she will consume imminently so we have in effect a half barter. 50% of every retail sale is barter.

We would have no economy that involve interaction between humans if it were not for the way we are designed by nature, our distributive labor nature. Once upon a time, a guy and a girl did what comes naturally and began a long journey together. Mother and father nature. Maybe we can look at that as nature’s initial act of distributed labor. Not long after they met a little girl was born and began her life. She announced her arrival very dramatically and in the course of a few days she will have begun to distribute her labor between crying, sleeping, cooling giggling, wiggling eating and its associated processes.

Distributor labor is part and parcel of the way we are designed. Learning to work with others and putting our efforts in the pool allow us to achieve more than we could by ourselves. In the course of that experience, we will learn to trade and to use common currencies to our advantage. That is why we included the words distributed labor in our definition of money.