"Inflation"- A Better Definition?

[scineram]

Care to refute it? Submit it to QJAE?

[Juan]

No, I don’t care to refute baseless assertions. Here : if the wright brothers never existed we would have no planes. Care to refute it ?

[scineram]

The point of the article was to provide arguments for the assertion. And they were good ones.

[WisR]

@scineram

The point of the article was to provide arguments for the assertion. And they were good ones.

And Juan’s point is that there is more than one way to skin a chicken.

Especially today with modern chicken skinning devices, it would be incredibly easy to substitute ‘grains of gold’ or whatever measures of weight for dollars in electronic, debit card transactions. In fact, as you know, the infrastructure is already there to do so (to have small debit based transactions w/o fractional reserve banking) throughout most of the developed world.

[Juan]

@WisR

Especially today with modern chicken skinning devices, it would be incredibly easy to substitute ‘grains of gold’ or whatever measures of weight for dollars in electronic, debit card transactions.

Indeed !

Now, as for Selgin’s article, here’s an interesting note

@Selgin

In the first decades of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain was confronted by a very serious small change shortage. The bimetallic legislation then in effect undervalued silver, so that few if any silver coins were minted, while those already in circulation tended either to be melted into bullion or to be very badly impaired.

It’s kinda obvious that the shortage was created by the gov’t itself (no wonder eh?). So remove gov’t regulations and you have a free-market bimetallic system which solves the problem without using the fiduciary media Selgin so much loves.

[scineram]

It would have lessened the problem, but hardly a satisfactory solution, for

Although he condemns bimet-
allism Rothbard (1974, n. 9) sees nothing wrong with parallel standards,
which he regards as being both workable and more consistent with a
truly free market approach to money; and although he never says so
explicitly, Rothbard may have regarded parallel standards as satisfactory
means for addressing the small change problem.
But while a “parallel” small change system would indeed be
immune to Gresham’s Law, such a system would involve high costs of
transacting, for change would have to be made using coins of a standard
money different from that on which the economy’s principle exchange
media would be based. If one were to imagine that shopkeepers in the
U.S. today were obliged to make change with euro coins, one would have
some idea of the costs in question, and of the nuisance they would
entail. Indeed, many nations, the U.S. among them, have at some point
in their histories had to rely on various foreign coins for some or all of
their payments, and it was problems posed by the ensuing, non-par
exchanges that supplied the greatest impetus for efforts to establish
complete and uniform domestic coinage systems. The American
colonists, for example, were forced to rely on Spanish silver coins for rou-
tine payments, while keeping accounts in English monetary units; and a
desire to escape the inconveniences of this state of affairs was among the
chief motivations behind the post-revolutionary drive to establish a
national coinage (cf. Carothers 1930, pp. 33–34).

[nirgrahamUK]

@scineram

If one were to imagine that shopkeepers in the
U.S. today were obliged to make change with euro coins, one would have
some idea of the costs in question, and of the nuisance they would
entail. Indeed, many nations, the U.S. among them, have at some point
in their histories had to rely on various foreign coins for some or all of
their payments, and it was problems posed by the ensuing, non-par
exchanges that supplied the greatest impetus for efforts to establish
complete and uniform domestic coinage systems.

this is politics not economics.

[scineram]

Nonsense, more like history. The latter sentence at least.

[nirgrahamUK]

biased opinion