Menger's theory of the origin of money
It is really just an elaboration of the first two pages of chapter 4 of The Wealth of Nations, isn't it?
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Graeber thinks he blew up both of them, so perhaps so.
ReplyDeleteCorrection: Graeber reports the findings of over 100 years of anthropology and history, which show that the Mengerian theory is not a universal theory of the origin of money, and that money can emerge by other processes.
DeleteIf people bothered to read Graeber's book, right on p. 75 he acknowledges that barter between strangers, especially, in long distance trade, probably produced the cacao money of Mesoamerica and the salt money of Ethiopia, basically as the Mengerian theory predicts.
But plenty of other societies seem to have developed money by other means, e.g., ancient Mesopotamian temples developed a silver unit of account based on its role as a weight measure and assigning a certain silver weight a value equal to the monthly grain ration paid to temple workers.