Who Were the Sea Peoples?

This is so rare that I have to note it : "Even more interesting, in a few rare cases the precious metal content of a famous coin of a previous era that no longer existed was used as the link coin. Monetary historians such as Munro call these 'ghost monies'. The advantage of having a ghost link coin rather than a current coin is that it the unit-of-account would stay constant over time, preserving the real value of debts and contracts." Here is what Mises had to say about the idea of trying to create "constant" money thus "preserving the real value of debts and contracts" (all quotes from Human Action , in the "Sphere of Economic Calculation" section): "Stability, the establishment of which the program of stabilization aims at, is an empty and contradictory notion. The urge toward action, i.e., improvement of the conditions of iife, is inborn in man... "If all human conditions were unchangeable, if all people were always...

One of the common arguments against fractional reserve banking is that money is a claim on "real" goods and services, and that the issuance of fractional reserve notes is fraudulent because it consists in issuing more "claims" than there are goods. This is a rather shocking doctrine for people who are supposedly followers of Mises to put forward. First of all, the distinction between "real" goods and the... what? fake good?... of money is inconsistent with subjectivism. Of course there is a difference between goods valued for their consumption, and those valued for producing goods valued for direct consumption. But does these people want to say a hammer or a forge are not "real" goods because we don't consume them directly? Secondly, money is not a claim on anything. Mises' prose would have dripped scorn if he had encountered this idea. To see the falsity of this idea, consider an economy using only gold coins as money. One day, it i...