Robinson Crusoe's Money;: or, The Remarkable Financial Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Remote Island CommunityWells, David Ames
General
Robinson Crusoe's Money;: or, The Remarkable Financial Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Remote Island Community
Wells, David Ames
Currency question -- United States; Money
Of course, to make this money equitable, and its issue, as claimed,
"the satisfactory solution of the great problem of labor and capital,"
there must be some presupposed equitable relation between eight hours
of shoe-making and a hundred pounds of corn. But one hundred pounds of
corn in Illinois are the result of only a quarter as much labor as a
hundred pounds in New England; and what comparison is there between
eight hours' work of a skilled mechanic and that of a mere cobbler
in making shoes? or of the man who performs a disagreeable, slavish
piece of work, and of the genius who invents or makes a machine that
makes this disagreeable work unnecessary?
E. D. Linton, of Boston, one of Warren's most eminent disciples,
improves on Warren's ideas, and proposes that the United States
Government should prepare and issue a currency, which should read
as follows:
The United States will pay One Dollar to Bearer, on demand, in ----
bushels of Illinois Fall Wheat, at United States No. 1 Store-house,
No. 12 River Street, Chicago, Ill.
This note is receivable for all debts due the United States.
And the same inferentially in respect to pigs, coal, shoes, and
the services of doctors, lawyers, and cooks. So, then, if the note
is not to be on its face a lie, and the promise is to be actually
performed on demand, the necessity will be absolute on the part of
the Government of the United States to have store-houses for wheat at
Chicago, pig-pens at Peoria, coal-mines or dépôts at Pottsville, and
trained professionals ready on call to plead a case, preach a sermon,
cure a cold, and cook a dinner; and all of these last must take their
pay in pigs if required. But as a pig has one value at Peoria, and
another value at almost every other place, the dollar's worth of pig
which the United States would pay might be a whole pig in one place,
a half in another, and possibly only the snout in another.
[17] Although, to all who have investigated the subject, the
evidence is conclusive that an irredeemable fluctuating paper money
is always made an agency for taxing with special severity all that
class of consumers who live on fixed incomes, salaries, and wages,
it has, nevertheless, always been a somewhat difficult matter to find
illustrations of the fact so clear and simple as carry conviction by
presentation that it does thus act to the classes most interested. With
a view of obtaining such an illustration, application was made some
months since to an eminent American merchant, whose large and varied
experience abundantly qualified him to discuss the subject; and the
result of the application may be thus stated:
Q. In buying in gold and selling in currency, what addition do you
make to your selling price, in the way of insurance, that the currency
received will be sufficient--plus profit, interest, etc.--to replace
or buy back the gold represented by the original purchase?
A. We do but very little of that now; hardly enough to speak about.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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