The Value of MoneyAnderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
General
The Value of Money
Anderson, Benjamin M. (Benjamin McAlester)
Money
On the other hand, writers of the "commodity school" (or "metallist
school"), writers who see the source of the value of money in the metal
of which it is made, can apply the utility theory readily to the value
of money, making the value of money depend on the marginal utility of
gold, or the standard metal, whatever it is. To the writers of this
school, it is incredible that anything which has no utility should
become money. Money must be either valuable itself, or else a
representative of some valuable thing. The value of money comes from the
value of the standard of value, and that value may, so far as the logic
of the situation is concerned, be as well explained by marginal utility
as the value of anything else. Typical of this view is Professor W. A.
Scott's discussion in his _Money and Banking_[64], though the emphasis
there is not on marginal utility as the explanation of the value of the
standard, but on the value (conceived of as an absolute quantity) of the
standard as essential to the existence of money, and the performance of
the money functions. Professor Scott attacks vigorously and effectively
Nicholson's exposition of the quantity theory,[65] where the assumption
is made that money consists of dodo-bones (the most useless thing
Nicholson could think of). Most quantity theorists would share
Nicholson's view that dodo-bones would serve as well as anything else
for money--or, to put the thing less fantastically, that the substance
of which money is made is irrelevant, that the only question is as to
the quantity, rather than the quality, of the money-units, and the
quantity of the money-units, not in pounds or bushels or yards, but in
abstract number merely. For writers who seek the whole explanation of
the value of money in its monetary application, and who see that money,
_qua_ money, cannot administer directly to human wants, the view that
Professor Fisher expresses, namely, that money has no utility, and is
unique among goods in this respect, seems on the surface, to have
justification. On the surface merely, however. Money is not unique among
goods in being wanted only for what it can be traded for. Wheat and corn
and stocks and bonds and everything else that is speculated in is
wanted, by the speculators, only as a means of getting a
profit[66]--they are remoter from the wants of the man who purchases
them than the money profit he anticipates. Ginsing, in America, has
value, though consumed only in China. And there are people, particularly
jewelers, who often want money as a raw material for consumption goods.
The difference is at most a difference of degree--and of slight degree
indeed in the case of such things as bonds, which count on the "goods"
side of the quantity theory price equation, but which really are in all
cases remoter than money itself from human wants. Money really stands,
for the purpose in hand, on the same level as any other instrumental
good.[67] It does not give forth services directly, as a rule.
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