Comment by fluoridation
Comment by fluoridation 12 hours ago
>We pay taxes in money because we have a diversified economy
It's all a fiction, though. Ultimately wealth can be translated to very raw things, like energy, space, and time. Using rice as currency is not too different from using Joules as currency, as it's ultimately just captured and stored solar radiation. The issue with using food as money is not that the economy is diverse, as it's ultimately for the most part powered by people eating. The issue is that if you spend money to make a km^2 of land usable for factories that produce, say, semiconductors, that's not exactly translatable to tons of rice.
> Using rice as currency is not too different from using Joules as currency
There are enough differences that we still need to worry about them: Would you really have no preference between them when there's a famine? Which one would you rather have when someone announces they've just cracked fusion power generation?
Even among such "suitable" commodities (durable, fungible, divisible, etc.) there are differences in risk/utility which don't vanish simply because there's a market for exchanging the two.
Fiat currency is significantly more isolated from such confounding factors, at least as long as people assume the government will continue to exist. It doesn't go crazy
> it's ultimately for the most part powered by people eating.
I am reminded of the subsistence farmer's reasons [0] for not converting everything they have to/from coinage:
> The thing is, as the food supply contracts, the price of food rises and the ability to buy it with money shrinks (often accelerated by food hoarding by the wealthy cities, which are often in a position to back that up with force as the administrative centers of states).
> Consequently, for the [farming] family, money is likely to become useless the moment it is needed most. So while keeping some cash around against an emergency (or simply for market transactions – more on that later) might be a good idea, keeping nearly a year’s worth of expenses to make it through a bad harvest was not practical.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...