The Value of MoneyAnderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
General
The Value of Money
Anderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
Money
THE CAPITALIZATION THEORY AND THE VALUE OF MONEY
Money is capital. A dollar is a capital-good. Money is, moreover, a
durable form of capital, which gives forth its services bit by bit, and
indeed, in a community where the state bears the burden of wear and
tear, never ceases to give forth those services. In any case, from the
standpoint of a given individual, so long as there is a limit of
tolerance prescribed for legal tender, it is a matter of accident if he
ever incurs a loss from the wastage of the capital instrument, money,
through wear and tear. Moreover, the fact that money is "fungible," and
that its use is to be found in a process which commonly returns to the
owner, not the same coin, but a different coin, we may, in general,
abstract from the wear and tear of the dollar, and look upon the dollar
as a capital instrument which promises its owner, if he chooses to use
it as capital, a perpetual annuity. The nature of this money service
will be more fully described later. For the present it is sufficient to
say that exchange is a productive process, that exchange creates values,
in as true a sense as manufacturing does, and that money facilitates
exchange in as true a sense as coal facilitates manufacturing. There is,
at any given time, a demand-curve for this money service, manifesting
itself in the money market, a demand for the short time use of money as
a tool of exchange, and the "prices" which come out of the interaction
of demand and supply in the money market are the short time "money
rates" including the "call rates." These are properly to be conceived,
not as pure interest on abstract capital, but as rents[58] which are to
be attributed to money as a concrete tool.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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