[Arm-netbook] Logos

[Christopher Havel]

Forgive me chiming in with an admittedly esoteric viewpoint... but...

What if "money" was a system of measurement, without intrinsic value...?
What I'm envisioning is a barter economy, regulated somewhat like
communistic states do -- but using a standardized system of
worth-measurement.

So, say I had bricks of cheese, and you had boxes of eggs. Given that my
cheese is say 0.5kg/brick, and you have 12 eggs to a box, we'd look up how
much the gov't says our relative goods are worth, and exchange
proportionately. So, say, one kg of cheese is worth ten credits that day,
and three eggs is worth one credit, so I'd get fifteen eggs per brick of
cheese, or five boxes of eggs for every four bricks of cheese if I've got
my math right (sorry, I'm severely math-challenged -- to the level of
having some sort of otherwise-unnamed "math fluency disorder" that I was
labeled with in grade school... the gist is that I understand the
*concepts* on actually something of a slightly advanced level, but I can't
manage the actual *exercises*, real-world or textbook, without a
half-decent calculator).

Alternatively, in a less-regulated society, we'd haggle for a while and
figure out for ourselves what eggs and cheese should be worth -- although
that somewhat sidesteps the need for standardized units altogether. Of
course, that one guy who only has stuff that absolutely nobody wants, kinda
gets into a bit of trouble in a barter economy... the conceptual system is
not without its flaws. But, hey, that's true of everything out there, so...
I dunno. /shrug