text:
User:Ortolan88

Now, gone for good. See you later. Not. Some asshole just destroyed blues ballad and I don't have the energy to fight it. Tom Parmenter, once Ortolan88, but no more. Ortolan88 (talk) 17:25, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

I just deleted my watchlist. The sorcerer's apprentice bit was killing me. I am falling way off in my interest in contributing to Wikipedia after 6000-plus edits because I don't like the current atmosphere very much. In addition to the usual trollery, there's the institutionalized trollery of arbitrarily stamping articles with downgrades and whines, and the absurd belief that anything that someone wrote in a book is superior to so-called "original research". Well, almost all of my 6000 contributions are original research by this definition and I take some pleasure in knowing that there's no way the Pecksniffs can find them all. I guess I just liked it better when there were only a couple of hundred real contributors and the self-appointed bureaucrats hadn't found it yet. Best of luck to you all, but it just isn't fun any more. I won't be doing anything much here, markup fixes, identifying 12-bar blues, but that's about it, except for looking stuff up and correcting the odd error here and there, using primarily original research. 17:56, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

PS -- I leave my user page as it was, for what it's worth, but I'm sure that wiki-rot has spoiled a lot of things I worked on.

After all, the cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.--Umberto Eco

''Note: After contributing to the Wikipedia with great enthusiasm for a year, I took a break starting 02:08 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC). Now I'm back.'' Ortolan88 19:05, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC) (Then I went away again for several months because I don't like getting angry, but now I'm back, mostly putting in commas and fixing italics, and following up on my favorite musicians.)

While I was away, I finally got my blog going, so visit me at Desperado blog. The blog is a continuation of Internet communications efforts I began in 1978.

It will be interesting to go through all these links to see what has survived more than a year of inattention on my part, but I'll tell you right now I'm putting the football stuff back in my hometown article.

There's an article about Wikipedia mentioning me in the Boston Globe West section September 28, 2006: "Answering Wikipedia's call to fill in the blanks" (free for now), but you'll have to go to the hard copy to see the pix.

I'm pretty happy with my contributions to these entries, many started by others, some where I put a few lines that please me for some reason, some substantially original. (I haven't gone back over this, but there has been some serious loss of content from some of these efforts over the years while I sulked in my tent.)

 * Language: A, an; The; William Strunk Jr. and The Elements of Style, bits of E.B. White, stuck in brief descriptions and examples for almost everything in the list under punctuation, setting off a flurry of improvements by others in both content and linking; English plural, which I started and others truly went to town on, and Talk:English plural, in which I entertain myself; eh, mostly; antonym, new word for old thing; homonym, from my adult literacy tutoring; which led to polysemy and hyponym; SAT college entrance test, a prime shuck; interjection (Wow!); contributed simile, contributed to metaphor;
 * Popular Culture: My personal favorite of all the pages I've worked on, Tom and Jerry, which includes first pair of that name and a great Frank Zappa story; the second paragraph of the article on Monty Python SPAM Sketch wherein it is revealed why SPAM is funny to Brits; Touch of Evil, the last of the B-movies; Slim Pickens and his brother Easy Pickens; Slim and Easy led me to clown, which I jump-started with the aid of Danny, including a description of the incredibly brave and resourceful rodeo clown; Harry Paget Flashman, everybody's favorite coward; Three Little Pigs, mostly in the fairy-tale part;  Edgar Bergen, lip-moving ventriloquist; Herbert Morrison, Hindenburg disaster broadcaster, interesting details; stewardess;
 * Music: My as yet incomplete musings about the first rock and roll record have so far led me to Ike Turner, a key figure, a/k/a Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (The latter was my first consolidation since two articles on a nonexistent band was too much, now morphed into "Rocket 88".  ) and of course Chuck Berry and Bill Haley and his Comets; Here's Minneapolis's own Prince with the completely reasonable story behind that "unpronounceable glyph"; The Who, whom I saw live many times; Soul music (which could use some other contributors); Big Joe Turner, the Boss of the Blues (if I were on a desert island, I'd be glad to have ten Joe Turner albums); Jethro Tull (agriculturist), the seed drill man (the band makes my teeth hurt); Bo Diddley; "Love is Strange", I love the strange convergences connected with this song; lullaby (What's with this down will come baby stuff!); Joe King Oliver; Louis Armstrong (Satchmo) wherein I peer over the NPOV edge; started  Original Dixieland Jass Band; Dizzy Gillespie; W.C. Handy and "Saint Louis Blues"; something nice about Desi Arnaz and Carmen Miranda; Castanets, a nice, clean entry; stuff about US music with a Latin influence in Latin American music, includes the "Spanish tinge" story; Maracas; Jimmie Rodgers, "the singing brakeman" only, that other guy does nothing for me; Grand Ole Opry; Colonel Bogey March, including the (R-rated) lyrics which Tarquin, who is bolder than me, added to the article where I had confined them to the talk page, but then I wrote Hitler has only got one ball with many variants and fascinating factoids, but all the variants were temporarily driven out by a fatuous interpretation of copyright, see the talk page for the whole sad story; mouthpiece, since greatly improved by others at my instigation; wah-wah, which involved some entertaining research; kazoo, symbol of American democracy; contributed to jug band, skiffle music, and rent party; First rock and roll record, record producer, rock and roll anthem, roots of rap music; John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful; power trio;  contributions of "Oh, Pretty Woman" to copyright law; beefed up teen idol; XERF, legendary Mexican radio; additions to Professor Longhair and jazz guitar; Top 40; hit parade; boogie woogie; Link Wray; Champion Jack Dupree, Lester Melrose, great producer, petty crook; Screaming Jay Hawkins, a truly great singer, trapped in a coffin; Route 66; Highway 61;
 * Politics and worse: Strategic bombing and the Strategic bombing survey (Europe),  which I arrived at via Dr. Strangelove; bit at the end of Maria Theresa of Austria about the busty monarch's afterlife on the Maria Theresa dollar; section on how the Jehovah's Witnesses have fought to protect our freedoms under the First Amendment (which I quit to avoid a troll war, but I'll be back);
 * Literature:Robert Louis Stevenson; Ford Madox Ford, Karel Capek; very slowly cranking up on Huckleberry Finn which was mostly about racism when I got there; picaresque novel, branching from previous; Farceur Georges Feydeau, which I wrote because I stuck a line in Fawlty Towers making a comparison; Literary technique, including many entries referenced from there (picaresque novel. word play, pastiche, satire, bits of parody); Samuel Richardson, horrible old phony; made sure that E. E. Cummings was known by his rightful, capitalized name; wrote cacotopia and contributed a little on dystopia and utopia; autobiographical novel; word play; Rafael Sabatini, who composed one of my mottoes, "He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad";
 * Public Services: 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, a how-to on using the grand old encyclopedia as a source, along with 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, a tribute to the book itself; first draft of the Manual of Style; first mentioned the idea of the village pump; started Guide to Layout; opened Browser notes; suggested the erstwhile Wikipedia Militia redub itself the Volunteer Fire Department; No offensive usernames contributor;
 * Above and beyond the rambot: I coined the word and also added substantially to the articles on Newton, Massachusetts, my home, Valdosta, Georgia, my home town and the high school football capital of the world, Moody Air Force Base, where I mention the beloved Miss Peaches and her immortal "Callin' Moody Field"; and Cedar Key, Florida, where I stayed overnight and was served gruel for breakfast; identified the namesake of Deaf Smith County, Texas;Habersham County, Georgia and Hall County, Georgia, wherein I quote Sidney Lanier's "Song of the Chattahoochee", about the river that starts there:

 * OUT of the hills of Habersham,
 * Down the valleys of Hall,
 * I hurry amain to reach the plain,
 * Run the rapid and leap the fall,
 * Split at the rock and together again

 * On to the musical history of Macon, Georgia and West Memphis, Arkansas; more poetry, why lovely villages on plains are named Auburn; Whitehall, Michigan; Magoffin County, Kentucky, birthplace of Larry Flynt; Lebanon, Pennsylvania; Waltham, Massachusetts; Erick, Oklahoma, my prize catch so far; an entertaining enccounter with a GFDL absolutist (that is, troll, just as in the Hitler incident) in Talk:Oregon City, Oregon; Ferriday, Louisiana, three piano-playing fools from there; Florence, Alabama; Orange Park, Florida, where my father was born and his father went broke; Winslow, Arizona (guess what); Enterprise, Alabama and its boll weevil statue; Lithonia, Georgia, birthplace of Brenda Lee; Stone Mountain, Georgia, the next little town over, home of the as yet unarticled Stone Mountain; Del Rio, Texas, home of XERF; Canton, Mississippi; Bogalusa, Louisiana; Zanesville, Ohio, hometown of Zane Grey;

 * Rescued from the Votes for deletion death row: Hans Selye, discoverer of stress; Arts and Crafts Movement, Mouthpiece, Ununennium, which led to boilerplate entries on the rest of the undiscovered Unun elements, which were immediately hopped up by Vicki Rosenzweig; Camp (style); Undocumented feature; Big Joe Turner; William Gaines, founder of MAD magazine (later expatiated on EC Comics and Max Gaines as well); the interesting social impact of the sleeping car, threatened with death row but never actually there; Super, they said it couldn't be done; read all about mountain bike bog snorkeling in peat bog; lightning rod; Uppsala Astronomical Observatory; ab- and -oid, two fine *fixes (and not dictionary entries, never were);
 * Removed from Most Wanted list: Copra, NTIA Manual of Regulations and Procedures for Federal Radio Frequency Management, Chicago Tribune, Soul music, Patricia Hearst, sausage,
 * Quirky Links: W.C. Handy to synthetic polymer; Agatha Christie to thallium; Muddy Waters to Bo Diddley and David Bowie; Clown and Intellectual property;
 * Favorite etymological discovery: Brace is R-rated, Bracket is X-rated. I stick OED and other etymologies in all sorts of articles; the one for Contract bridge is kind of neat;

I try to keep my entries concise, but I'm a sucker for an illuminating anecdote. I've added this and that to hundreds of articles, frequently etymologies or unexpected aspects. I lurk in Talk pages where I have no particular right to be and try to speak up for the hapless reader. I also started a crusade to add one-liners, dates, and such to entries on what I call "naked lists", those dreary endless lists of unidentified people, places, or things that infest the Wikipedia. See List of novelists, for example, where most one-liners are by other folks. I got the idea from List of battles. See Talk:List of famous operas for a brief manifesto. See Talk:List of novelists to gauge how hopeless this crusade is against Yeatsian "passionate intensity". Sometimes I lose a little enthusiasm for this crusade, but I keep doing it. List of famous cemeteries has been fun.

I enjoy adding a little bit to an entry and then taunting someone else into doing the job right with provocative summary comments. I also like fixing links and adding links and sticking summaries in near the top of entries. I did all that with Julius Caesar which other people have vastly improved. I also like the three paragraphs on tactics that I added to Coup d'etat. I only put a few words in Uncle Tom, but someone wrote it after I almost, but not quite flatly, wrote that Louis Armstrong was not one. On the other hand, I managed to torpedo an ugly prejudiced article on white trash and turn it into something like an encyclopedia article. Following this dismal theme, I wrote yid while rival sects clashed on the talk page, and also contributed earlier to nigger as well as to some stuff about the First amendment in Jehovah's Witnesses and term of disparagement. I've also worked on blackface where I introduced the concept of audio blackface to an astounded talk page audience of one.

I think copra is a good example of an encyclopedia article as opposed to a dictionary definition. Castanets too.

I'm a writer by birth, trade, and inclination. I have been writing for publication since 1957 and have earned my living by my pen since 1962. I started as a police reporter and political reporter and newspaper rewrite man in Chicago. See City News Bureau of Chicago and Chicago's American for tales of those absurd, brave days. Since then I have worked as magazine writer, an academic ghostwriter at Washington University and Harvard, and technical writer for DEC, Symbolics, Apple, and Atria Software.

As a technical jack-of-all-trades, I developed numerous schemes for online and printed documentation as well as helping design user interfaces and a couple of markup languages. I also managed groups of tech writers, software engineers, training developers, and sysadmins. I have also written rock and roll songs and advertisements and an unpublished novel about Richard Nixon. I started the Desperado mailing list in 1978, one of the oldest mailing lists on the Internet. There was an article about it in Wired Magazine. I have just finished a book on language purism and English usage which I am flogging. I've been married more than 40 years and have two sons and three granddaughters.

Mail me: [mailto:tom-parmenter@comcast.netTom Parmenter]

Post scriptum: After forgetting any number of boring AIM user names based on various pieces of my straight name and numerous three-digit numbers, I invented a nom de guerre that no one else would ever have. The ortolan is a bird the French eat whole with napkins over their heads to hold in the said-to-be wonderful aroma of the grease-gushing bird body, and 88 is in memory of Dr. John's boast after a particularly spectacular piano run, "dat's what dey call radiatin' on de eighty-eight".

 * Il ne faut jamais
 * faire les choses à moitié
 * Jacques Prevert, from a children's poem about a bird devoured whole by a cat.

Hi Ortolan88, I hope you stop by occasionally to see if anyone's written on your talk page. You might be interested to read Le Testament français (Dreams of My Russian Summers) by Andrei Makine, which discusses ortolan eating! Best wishes and sorry you left. It's really not so bad. You should come back. Oh! I forgot to mention that supposedly ortolans were the last meal of François Mitterand (] [[User:Evangeline|Evangeline]). (talk) 07:41, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

-- This caught my eye: "Drinking Wine Ove Sprogøe" :-D --SeanO 00:17, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User:Ortolan88


text:
Commodity money

Commodity money is money whose value comes from a commodity of which it is made. Commodity money consists of objects having value or use in themselves (intrinsic value) as well as their value in buying goods. This is in contrast to representative money, which has no intrinsic value but represents something of value such as gold or silver, for which it can be exchanged, and fiat money, which derives its value from having been established as money by government regulation.

Examples of commodities that have been used as media of exchange include gold, silver, copper, salt, peppercorns, tea, jewellery (watches, spectacles, etc.), decorated belts, shells, alcohol, cigarettes, silk, cereal, candy, nails, cocoa beans, cowries, coupons (Canadian Tire "money"), canned food, fast-food items (burgers, sandwiches, fried chicken, etc.), pornographic material, detergents (laundry, dishwasher, soap), clothes (shirts, socks, hat, shoes), and fuel (coal, gasoline, batteries, etc.). Sometimes several types of commodity money were used together, with fixed relative values, in various commodity valuation or price system economies.

Aspects
Commodity money is to be distinguished from representative money, which is a certificate or token which can be exchanged for the underlying commodity, but only by a formal process. A key feature of commodity money is that the value is directly perceived by its users, who recognize the utility or beauty of the tokens as goods in themselves. Since payment by commodity generally provides a useful good, commodity money is similar to barter, but is distinguishable from it in having a single recognized unit of exchange. Radford (1945) described the establishment of commodity money in P.O.W camps.

"People left their surplus clothing, toilet requisites and food there until they were sold at a fixed price in cigarettes. Only sales in cigarettes were accepted – there was no barter [...] Of food, the shop carried small stocks for convenience; the capital was provided by a loan from the bulk store of Red Cross cigarettes and repaid by a small commission taken on the first transactions. Thus the cigarette attained its fullest currency status, and the market was almost completely unified."

Radford documented the way that this 'cigarette currency' was subject to Gresham's law, inflation, and especially deflation.

In another example, in US prisons after smoking was banned circa 2003, commodity money has switched in many places to containers of mackerel fish fillets, which have a fairly standard cost and are easy to store. These may be exchanged for many services in prisons where currency is prohibited.

Metals
In metallic currencies, a government mint will coin money by placing a mark on metal tokens, typically gold or silver, which serves as a guarantee of their weight and purity. In issuing this coinage at a face value higher than its costs, the government gains a profit known as seigniorage.

The role of a mint and of coin differs between commodity money and fiat money. In commodity money, the coin retains its value if it is melted and physically altered, while in a fiat money it does not. Usually, in a fiat money the value drops if the coin is converted to metal, but in a few cases the value of metals in fiat moneys have been allowed to rise to values larger than the face value of the coin. In India, for example, fiat Rupees disappeared from the market after 2007 when their content of stainless steel became larger than the fiat or face value of the coins. In the US, the metal in pennies (97.5% zinc since 1982, 95% copper in 1982 and before) and nickels (75% copper, 25% nickel) has a value close to, and sometimes exceeding, the fiat face value of the coin.

History

Commodities often come into being in situations where other forms of money are not available or not trusted, and these are social norms. Various commodities were used in pre-Revolutionary America including wampum (shell beads), maize (corn), iron nails, beaver pelts, and tobacco.

In Canada, where the Hudson's Bay Company and other fur trading companies controlled most of the country, fur traders quickly realized that gold and silver were of no interest to the First Nations. They wanted goods such as metal knives and axes. Rather than use a barter system, the fur traders established the made beaver (representing a single beaver pelt) as the standard currency, and created a price list for goods:

 * 5 pounds of sugar cost 1 beaver pelt
 * 2 scissors cost 1 beaver pelt
 * 20 fish hooks cost 1 beaver pelt
 * 1 pair of shoes cost 1 beaver pelt
 * 1 gun cost 12 beaver pelts

Other animal furs were convertible into beaver pelts at a standard rate as well, so this created a viable currency in an economy where precious metals were not valued. However, for convenience, Hudson's Bay post managers exchanged made beaver coins, which were stamped pieces of copper or brass.

Long after gold coins became rare in commerce, the Fort Knox gold repository of the United States functioned as a theoretical backing for Federal Reserve. Between 1933 and 1970 (when the U.S. officially left the gold standard), one U.S. dollar was technically worth exactly 1/35 of a troy ounce (889 mg) of gold. However, actual trade in gold bullion as a precious metal within the United States was banned after 1933, with the explicit purpose of preventing the "hoarding" of private gold during an economic depression period in which maximal circulation of money was desired by government policy. This was a fairly typical transition from commodity to representative to fiat money, with people trading in other goods being forced to trade in gold, then to receive paper money that purported to be as good as gold, and finally a fiat currency backed by government authority and social perceptions of value.

Cigarettes and gasoline were used as a form of commodity money in some parts of Europe, including Germany, France and Belgium, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. They have continued to be used as currency in war-torn locations experiencing inadequate supply of common goods and monetary collapse, such as during the Siege of Sarajevo in 1993 or in Russian-occupied Kherson in 2022.

Functions

Although grains such as barley have been used historically in relations of trade and barter (Mesopotamia circa 3000 BC), they can be inconvenient as a medium of exchange or a standard of deferred payment due to transport and storage concerns and eventual spoilage. Gold or other metals are sometimes used in a price system as a durable, easily warehoused store of value (demurrage).

The use of barter-like methods using commodity money may date back to at least 100,000 years ago. Trading in red ochre is attested in Swaziland, shell jewellery in the form of strung beads also dates back to this period, and had the basic attributes needed of commodity money. To organize production and to distribute goods and services among their populations, before market economies existed, people relied on tradition, top-down command, or community cooperation. Relations of reciprocity, and/or redistribution, substituted for market exchange.

The city-states of Sumer developed a trade and market economy based originally on the commodity money of the Shekel, which was a certain weight measure of barley, while the Babylonians and their city-state neighbors later developed the earliest system of economics using a metric of various commodities, that was fixed in a legal code.

Several centuries after the invention of cuneiform script, the use of writing expanded beyond debt/payment certificates and inventory lists to codified amounts of commodity money being used in contract law, such as buying property and paying legal fines.

Legal tender issues
Today, the face value of specie and base-metal coins is set by government fiat, and it is only this value which must be legally accepted as payment for debt, in the jurisdiction of the government which declares the coin to be legal tender. The value of the precious metal in the coin may give it another value, but this varies over time. The value of the metal is subject to bilateral agreement, just as is the case with pure metals or commodities which had not been monetized by any government. As an example, gold and silver coins from other non-U.S. countries are specifically exempted in U.S. law from being legal tender for the payment of debts in the United States, so that a seller who refuses to accept them cannot be sued by the payer who offers them to settle a debt. However, nothing prevents such arrangements from being made if both parties agree on a value for the coins.

title: Commodity money


text:
Talk:Commodity money

standard links in titles
I've been using a standard for links in titles.

Which is: if the meaning of the phrase is precisely and only and exactly what one would expect by applying the adjective to the noun, I'll link both terms, or just the noun, as applicable, directly in the title itself.

If, on the other hand, the combination has non-obvious implications, I link only the base term e.g. "classical economics", I won't do that for "classical", just for "economics", since that's the anchor term, and a link to "classical" will be about Greek and Roman architecture, most likely. The link isn't useful to the reader to understand the subject we already know they care about.

So, if there problems with that standard, let's talk about it. It requires some judgement but so does everything. -24. --

I removed a lot of stuff that was clearly NPOV.
 * I don't think so. I think you removed a lot of stuff that you don't understand.  That said, I don't mind if this article remains short, and avoids the 20th century history of this type of money.  The inter-relationship of commodity, credit and fiat got complicated in the 20th century, and the articles overlap a fair bit, explaining how each means of backing relied ultimately on both of the others.-24
 * it would help if you would say exactly what offended you, as your "clearly NPOV" is the rest of the world's "blindingly obvious" in a great many cases.

 * the views of green economists and the bank for international settlements are clearly stated in those articles.

 * The last couple of paragraphs is extremely well-attributed, mentioning among other things the views of the 1999 "Nobel Prize Winner in Economics" (which the Nobel family claims is a fraudulent name for what was always called the Swedish Bank Prize), that being Amartya Sen. I don't see how you can claim this is somehow not attributed, or even a very controversial view. 24

 * I know enough economic history to know that what I deleted was *NOT* mainstream and non-controversial, nor is it "blindingly obvious" to the rest of the world. If I'm wrong and it is then someone else will put it back.
 * the history of the US gold standard is well known, the role of the BIS is well documented, and Sen actually based his book on a series of lectures at the World Bank - certainly citing his view with attribution is reasonable even if it is *not* mainstream - apologies for not citing his WB post and for assuming that Swedish Bank Prize winners represent a mainstream (they usually do but perhaps 3 to 5 years in advance)24
 * it would help much if you told me what specifically offended you about the characterization of the recent evolution of commodity money. 24
 * The history of the US gold standard is indeed well known, but you have given absolutely no indication that you know anything about it. You haven't mentioned any of the reasons at all why the United States gave up the gold standard and have shown no indication that you know what they are.
 * I'm not interested in the "Reasons Why" unless they are beyond all historical dispute.

Instead, you have this persistent habit of claiming knowledge that you do not have.
 * well, I've been accussed of that before, and 80% of the time it turns out these are terminology differences, 15% of the time they are disputed facts, and only 5% of the time am I actually "Wrong". Which, given all I've written, and that only about 20% of articles are challenged, means I may be 1% wrong, which is a pretty good record.
 * I'm not an expert in economics. I've only read some basic college textbooks, but at this point I'm convinced that I know more about the subject of commodity money and fiat money than you do.  There are some extremely basic and important facts that you've left out, and I believe you've left them out because you have no clue what they are.
 * well, you attempting to differentiate "commodity money" from "representative money" shows me the opposite - nearly all economists break down the various ways to back money as "commodity, credit, and fiat" and don't make an issue of representation - rather they assumed that some state is guaranteeing non-counterfeiting. The Sumerian example is critical to get to the roots of that question, and what the difference is between commodity and representative money, in your parlance, and yet you omit it from both articles.  And, in the process, taking out the only funny line in the article.  Shame on you.  You are making this no fun.
 * So you tell me, what most economists think was the trigger to cause United States move to fiat money?  I bet you just don't know.
 * maybe not, as it's not clear what you *mean* - since you think this "representative" issue is so important - as far as I'm concerned a state has moved to fiat money the second it shaves any metal at all off its coins. As I recall that first happened in the USA in the Revolutionary War.  Anyway, it's irrelevant to the article, as it shouldn't speculate on cause overmuch - nor is there much concern about coinage versus paper bills in modern times - as the state is presumed to back both.  But, the US Civil War was the first time that money was issued that was not *CLAIMED TO BE* strictly backed by gold, if I have that fact straight.  But the evolution post that time is more interesting - 1865-1970 when there was this fake gold standard.

Also don't try looking on google for the answer. I've got access to google too, and it's going to be obvious if you just copy the first page that seems to give the right answer.
 * I would never do that. That's LDC's specialty.  The most relevant page I can find is this gold standard = fiat in disguise which argues, as I did, that there is actually no real difference between the faux gold standard (which you call "representative money" and I call just more "fiat money") and just plain military fiat banking.

Frankly, I suspect you have never spoken to an economist outside the classical or neoclassical tradition. Globally, that makes you quite common, but you shouldn't claim to understand the fundamentals if you don't.

The Qing dynasty system is interesting - why don't you elaborate on that, commit yourself to some view or other of the gold standard versus the fiat, and we can nitpick at it for days.

As to what "most economists think", that depends on whether you are talking about the USA where economists are generally wholly ignorant even of the Marxist analysis, and thus are not economists proper but rather propagandists, or whether you are talking about the UK where the Empire-centric view prevails (empire as guarantor of trade and military power signified by acceptability of notes versus precious metal coins).

From the UK view, one would have to say that US imperialism at the turn of the 19th to 20th century forced it to shift to fiat money. Whether they continued to claim that gold was backing it, or the future productive potential of new colonies like the Phillippines or Hawaii or Alaska, is quite irrelevant, as nothing that imperialists say is more than pro-empire propaganda, ultimately.

And, an outright Marxist would say something completely different. So you tell me the scope of "most economists" and I'll give you some kind of answer, that you will claim is "wrong" because of your high school understanding, and you keep issuing your high school surprise quiz, and nothing will get done.

I think we're better off if you write what you think the gold standard meant, and how it fcilitated the shift from commodity to "representative" to fiat money. Also what you think credit means, since the idea of a division of function between fiat and representative money truly fuzzes that question.

Looking forward to it.

Hey. Guys. Don't forget that with timestamps and signatures, you can make your discussion legible to people who aren't you. (You do know there are people who aren't you, don't you?) Use tildes (~):  either three (69.49.44.11), four (69.49.44.11 14:34, 9 December 2006 (UTC)), or five (14:34, 9 December 2006 (UTC)). And, not to be partisan or anything, but "I removed a lot of stuff that was clearly NPOV" strikes me as a famous last words sort of statement. Even if the removal is entirely apt, the explanation is unlikely to inform, persuade, or comfort anyone.

Condoms?
Is there a source for the condoms claim? It seems fishy to me. We also need sources for the other commodities used.

RandomP 12:27, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

 * That struck me as very strange too. I've removed condoms from the list. — Greentryst TC 15:57, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Rewrite
This page appears to be a hodgepodge of people's pet monetary theories. -- Scott eiπ  13:06, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

 * Looks okay to me. What in particular do you see as a problem? ←Ben B4  18:57, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

 * Let's start with the prolipsis of the article:

 * "Commodity money is money whose value comes from a commodity of which it is made. Commodity money consists of objects that have value in themselves (intrinsic value) as well as value in their use as money."

 * This is not the historical reality of commodity money and the citation supporting it comes from 2004, which is presenting a distorted view of this topic which is well documented in far older sources.

 * Commodity money is a medium of exchange that represents a claim on a specific commodity... stored in a warehouse of an ancient city state. These "claim tickets" were first made from things like paper, wood, bamboo and later were made of metal tokens. The shekel is a good example of commodity money (that article serves well enough as a citation in support of this entire point I am making here), it was valuable, not because it was made of metal, but because it represented a claim of a measure of grain. A US Gold Certificate is another example of commodity money, it represented a claim on a measure of gold.

 * Gold Coin, which is different than gold bullion, is technically fiat money because its use, weights & measures are always established by "official decree." It is also technically using the barter system, bartering measures of gold for other things.

 * This article is confusing the "barter system" with the "monetary system". It is falsely branding the things commonly bartered as "money." Coin is coin (which is the name of a class/type of money), not commodity money... unless the coin represents a claim on a commodity like the shekel.

 * It also makes an incorrect distinction between commodity money and representative money. Commodity money IS representative money, but it is a specific kind of representative money that represents only a single kind of commodity. Many forms of representative money represent a group of commodities or assets (almost every modern Nations money supply is a form of representative money). Christopher Theodore (talk) 20:10, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Moved material
Commodity money is COMPOSED of the commodity. Thus, a lot of the stuff at the end of the article about "revival" of money based on resources, labor, or time, was really about representative money (another Wiki). I've moved it there, where it was already partly duplicated. I haven't deleted any material. Hope nobody's too offended, but I'm using the standard definitions which I think everybody agrees on. By the way, when a nation's currency is traded like a commodity, that doesn't make the stuff commodity money. It's still fiat money, which is TRADED like a commodity. For developing nations, the value of such stuff ends up being set in effect not by fiat, but by the market, which makes the money nearly representative money (Cuban Peso = so much Cuban sugar, so far as other countries are concerned). But actually this is a bad example, as I'm not sure other countries will take any kind of Cuban money from Cuba. We may need to use another example of a developing country if this is the case. Cuba's international currency status is particularly bad. S B Harris 23:21, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

 * Agreed. There are still too many tangentially related economic theories here. Let's only add cited material covering currency COMPOSED of a commodity --Wragge 09:31, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

 * Disagreed. That definition confuses the "barter system" with the "monetary system", and this is not an article about the barter system, but an aspect of the monetary system. Commodity money is a form of representative money that represents a single commodity. The shekel is an example of commodity money, not because it is metal, but because it is a metal token that represented a claim on a measure of grain in the city states' warehouses. The US Gold Certificate is another, more modern example, of commodity money, it represented a claim on a measure of gold bullion in the Treasury. "Coin" is its own class of money and why it is a proper noun in the original Constitution. The use of Coin, their weights and measures, are established by "official decree," ergo, Coin is a specific form of fiat. Christopher Theodore (talk) 20:52, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Actually, here's a paragraph which talks entirely about paper money. I've moved it out of the article about 'commodity money' because this is really a discussion about 'commodity' & 'money' in a general sense. It's closely related to the subject of this article, but confusing to have here. I'm not sure where these ideas (when cleaned up) should go, but since it isn't about circulating commodities as cash it can't be here. The paragraph was....
 * For this reason, commodity money has remained active in the background in some form or another, and in a sense has been revived thanks to global capitalism, wherein a currency itself is widely traded in the same way as a commodity. In such trade, the currency of resource-rich nations tends to be tied to the price of those particular resources as commodity items (i.e., it becomes a kind of de facto representative money for the commodity), until the nation becomes a "developed nation". Thus, the value of the "fiat money" of (for example) Cuba in international markets is closely linked to the international value of the commodity "sugar", rather than to the nominal value set by government and military power of Cuba, which fix the value of Cuban currency within Cuba's borders.

If I'm wrong about this, please define what the subjects covered on 'commodity money' should include. --Wragge 09:46, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Some history
Added concerning commodity money. Some referenced citations to historical connections of law and city state society regarding commodity money. skip sievert (talk) 05:16, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

The definition link is invalid, by the way: ''Sullivan, arthur; Steven M. Sheffrin (2022). Economics. Paramus, New Jersey: Savvas Learning Company ISBN 0-13-063085-3. https://www.savvas.com/index.cfm?locator=PS3jRm.'' Pestergaines (talk) 12:32, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

The city-states of Sumer and the market
"The city-states of Sumer  developed a trade and market economy..."

If by market we mean an allocation institution which sets prices. Now, if memory serves correct the Sumerians had what is called a "palace economy" in which prices were set administratively. If this is correct, then it would definitely rule out markets as being used by the Sumerians. I am not an expert in this area, I very well could be wrong. I leave it to other more intelligent people to decide. I just wanted to through the idea out there. 24.36.78.185 (talk) 21:48, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

English Mint
History section would benefit from the creation of banks by Whigs circa 1700 in England, and Newton running the mint at that time. I don't know this history at all but vaguely understand that was when England figured out the core idea of fiat money. 99.153.64.179 (talk) 03:16, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

Value of Commodity Money
The article says: "commodity money, the coin retains its value if it is melted and physically altered"

This implies the value of commodity money is determined by its material composition. That being so, it follows that the value of a commodity when "commodity money" is the same market price as its value when merely a commodity. But, if this is true, then the value of any finished coin would be exactly the same as the value of the unminted gold (of equal weight/purity) from which it was made, ie: the market price of gold. But if this is true then the minting of coins could occur only at a perpetual loss. As no sane person would do this, it follows that the minting of coins should NOT occur & coins should not exist. The same can be said for the production of any form of physical money, from paper notes, wooden tallies, clay tablets or iron bars. As this is obviously not the case, the value of any coin CANNOT be determined by its composition & therefore "commodity money" CANNOT exist. There is no commodity money. Vilhelmo (talk) 15:23, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

creation of commodity money, the money supply, and counterfeiting
I would like to see the topics of creation of commodity money, the money supply, and counterfeiting addressed explicitly and more directly. For example, if bags of barley are used as a commodity currency, was it OK to grow barley and add it to the money supply, or did some agreement prevent this from happening? Thanks! --Lbeaumont (talk) 13:59, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

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Cannabis removal
I would remove "cannabis" in the second paragraph as an "example of commodities that have been used as mediums of exchange"... this devil weed could lead to schizophrenia... I am against the legalisation and commerce of such muck. 138.41.38.2 (talk) 10:32, 20 March 2017 (UTC) 138.41.38.2 (talk) 10:32, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

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To fix in this article
To fix in this article: the failure to provide a wikilink or definition for the word "specie." 173.88.246.138 (talk) 01:30, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Commodity money


text:
Talk:High anxiety

Is the first part of this page the gibberish it seems to be to me? 'high anxiety' = the fear of high places! Can ANYONE validate this or should it be removed? KJ

Suspicion confirmed: Google found nothing for "Fear of height" AND "High anxiety" and "Fear of high places" AND "High anxiety". I'll let you do the honors Karen. This can then become a disambiguation page --maveric149

But it was such nicely cross-referenced gibberish... lol

title: Talk:High anxiety