Almost all of our relationships begin, and most of them continue, as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods. ~W.H. Auden
I noticed something today (as opposed to yesterday’s ostensible notice that the free drugs are the illegal ones). Bartering must be something inbred into every human being.
Stop and think about it for a minute, children who have no siblings to trade with will still trade toys in what they feel is a mutually favorable trade. Even young children who have no concept of money the way adults do will trade with one another if they both feel it’s mutually beneficial.
I started thinking about this, all the way back as far as I could in my poor over taxed cranium, and found that barter (along with war) is as old as mankind itself. Stop and think about it for a minute, caveman A has extra pelts from last month’s hunt, caveman B has extra meat from this week’s hunt, caveman A hungry, approaches caveman B with an offer of pelts for meat, should caveman B be in need of pelts a trade is likely, if not then caveman A needs to learn to hunt better or go find another caveman with a surplus of food and no pelts.
What is money after all but a representative store of value (the actual value being the goods that the money purchases). Money in the form of gold and silver coins, rocks (artistically made), sticks( marked with the kings markings), and even sea shells have been over the years used as a means of exchange, they are all easily divisible, easily transported in large quantities, and have a given “value” per quantity. Whether through mutual agreement as to their value, or necessary direction from whatever government happened to be in place at the time.
All money really did was move from a direct barter model to a distributed barter model where a person took some “money” (for our argument we’ll assume it’s something that meets the above criteria) and spend it with a merchant for those pelts he needed. The person would then take the pelts home, and make say shoes out of them, and then sell the shoes to some other person for more money than he paid for the pelts. By doing so the people involved did not have to worry about obtaining the animal themselves, or making the pelt usable for something.
They could keep their money in their pockets until it was needed to purchase whatever it was that was needed, as they traded goods and labor for more money they could keep the “money” for longer periods of time without worrying about it going bad or spoiling, spending only what they could in equivalent labor or products.
I would venture to guess that this was a natural evolution of civilization, as man became more agrarian he no longer needed to “fair trade” with his neighbors for things that he needed some approximation of his labors that he could keep without having to worry about it going bad. He could also save his new money (read labor) for something that he (I use he to as a general reference to both genders) could not otherwise generate a sufficient amount of labor for at one shot, if he took his corn, beets, carrots, or whatever to market, and sold them to the various people who came around at one time he may not be able to afford that shiny new whatever he really wanted for his hovel, however if he saved a portion of the proceeds from his labors everyday at the market he would in time have enough for the shiny whatever he wanted for his hovel. Perhaps it was a new more efficient plow blade that allowed him to be more efficient in his labors, thus giving him more bang for the “buck” and allowing him to take more to market on a given day.
One thing is for certain however, and that is when money was a fixed supply of whatever it was, gold, silver, shells, artistic stones or sticks, there was no inflation. A pelt was worth X number of whatever was in vogue, should a merchant want to make more than that he would either have to come up with better quality pelts, or more of them at a given time. He would eventually spend whatever “money” he had anyway obtaining the things he needed on a day to day basis, so the money circulated and was said to have velocity, this velocity of money is what caused an economy. For those who could labor and bring more to market they received a larger portion of the economic pie.
All I know is somewhere along the line we lost sight of bartering, and it’s a skill even the youngest among us has, we should all take a lesson from the kids, trade for what you want, starve the beast of corprotacracy and regain a real value for what you need.
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