3. Next we get money substitutes. You deposit your gold for safe-keeping. The safekeeper gives you a receipt “This house promises to pay the bearer one (1) ounce of gold on demand”. When buying stuff, you can tender this note as payment and the creditor may accept it because he is confident the safekeeper will redeem it for gold. This is the origin of “banknotes” – paper money. They are *substitutes* because they are redeemable in money in specie, e.g. cheques, promissory notes, credit cards.
4. At this conceptual stage there is still no legal tender. Everyone is free to offer their money on the market. Now imagine a person wants to pass off as money a gold coin debased with 90% tin, or paper "money" (not money substitute - money) in specie, the supply of which he can increase at will. No-one would ever accept it! He is unable to force them to exchange valuable goods for his rubbish money.
5. But government can, and that’s exactly what they do. Enter legal tender. Using their monopoly of force, States pass laws that a creditor must accept payment in the State's nominated money, or lose his bargain, i.e. forego the use of money. The effect is to monopolise the supply of money, to force everyone else to use government’s inferior product which would be rejected in the market. We know this it true because otherwise there’d be no need to pass a law requiring it to be accepted!
At this stage there is still no fiat money. But government can, and governments did and do, debase the currency, for example by coin clipping, or by adding tin or brass. The effect is to defraud the population, in every way as it would be fraudulent for a private provider to debase coinage. Only governments can and do carry on the fraud openly, and compel everyone to submit to it.
6. Fiat money develops when government finally declares that money is whatever the government says it is – it is nothing but the force-monopolists' “let it be so”.

It is that last development that you have totally confused with money as a general category of the most-acceptable medium of exchange.

So my answer to your question:
“What is the difference between the money that is "the people’s first preference", and the money that you judge is forcibly imposed upon them by the legal tender laws.”

Is:
What they they would have chosen to use as money if the legal tender laws did not exist.

But your theory has no way of answering that question. It lacks the conceptual category of money that is not government monopoly inflato-rama paper rubbish.

Legal tender laws originated because States notoriously kept debasing their coinage, and private providers of money kept outcompeting them in the market.

As for the alleged benefits of legal tender laws, please try explaining what they are, this time without confusing money per se with legal tender.

For example, the people of Paraguay use a different species of money than you use, to carry on transactions in which you have no direct interest. Is it a detriment to you that they use a different money? No. So why is the case any different as concerns transactions in Australia in which you have no interest? So long as a seller agrees to accept what you tender, what is it to you if other people elsewhere accept some other species of money, whether they are in Paraguay or Australia?

We can see how my theory explains the facts of legal tender. There is a conflict of interest between the State and everyone else as concerns the supply of money. Legal tender laws benefit the State at the expense of society in general, because they privilege State agents to pass off inferior money, and to steal from everyone else by inflating the supply at will, all backed by their monopoly of force.

But how does your theory explain it? Why is it a general benefit to society for sellers to be compelled to accept a money they would prefer not to accept, or lose their bargain? What about the detriments of inflation?

It is a bit of a one-sided discussion though, isn't it Jardine K Jardine.

>>So in a discussion whether government monopoly control of the supply of money confers a general benefit on society, or rather benefits State agents at the expense of society in general, your theory has no explaining power<<

You have asserted that the government has "monopoly control over the supply of money" without proof, and then proceed to wrap all your rationale around that single, eminently false, assertion. You must admit, that is highly limiting to any real discussion, when you provide the answer within the question.

But what is it about this money?

>>I’m asking about the conceptual category of money itself, of which fiat money and legal tender are sub-categories, whereas you’re talking about money defined as legal tender.<<

But as we have already established, right here on this thread, if you are able to lump all sub-categories into your definition of "money", then we are able to also include "shells, and wampum, and tobacco, and gold, and holey dollars, and so on – I mean not as commodities, but as *money*"

As we have also agreed, some time ago, a promissory note from the Clydesdale Bank is highly acceptable as money, in many parts of the world. And we have also noted that in many countries whose government also has Currency and Legal Tender laws, there exists a parallel market in which the value perceived by the user is recognized through a different exchange rate. Which could just as easily apply to your Jardinian money.

So your working definition of the particular money over which the government has monopoly control seems to full of holes. Which generally is not a term used where a monopoly is concerned.

-contd-

This is I think at the heart of your confusion:

>>And legal tender laws make one particular favoured species of money legal tender – therefore they must make all other possible species of money not-legal tender, mustn’t they? Yes.<<

Legal tender laws exist for identification purposes, and to ensure creditors don't wriggle out of a legitimate payment when it is made. They do not make other forms of payment illegal, however.

It goes like this: here's a million Australian dollars to clear my debt with you. Assuming it doesn't bounce, you are obliged to accept it. Or I could say, here's a million Jardinian dollars to clear my debt. You are not obliged to accept this as payment, but it is not illegal to do so. So, even though the Jardinian dollar is not-legal-tender, it is not illegal to tender it.

Your habit of answering your own question also confuses you.

>>And therefore those other species exist as a conceptual category? Yes. And the whole point of legal tender laws is to stop those other possible species of money from existing in fact, isn’t it? Yes.<<

No. See above. The purpose of the legal tender laws is to ensure that the creditor cannot refuse a legitimate payment, not to make any other form of payment illegal.

>>Therefore legal tender money is a species of the genus money, and your limiting the definition of money to legal tender only, is factually and conceptually false<<

With respect, it is you who is banging on about the limiting powers of the legal tender laws. And you are right, anyone who limits themselves to this narrow definition of money is kidding themselves.

So, we have agreed that money is not just legal tender. What we haven't established is how the government maintains control over all these other forms of money. Or, in your words, "government monopoly control of the supply of money".

If the legal tender laws only cover legal tender, how do they manage to exert a monopoly influence over all the other stuff?

Thanks for your attempts to answer questions I posed, JKJ… I really intended them as indications of topics for my further research after I had new floors and a new roof and didn't have the preoccupation of a house full of carpenters, mechanical plumbers and tilers.

[As an experiment (given some of the discussion above) I did ask them if they'd take your dildos but though there was what I took as a momentary flicker of interest from an apprentice the answer was no.]

But a response is in order, even if the thread has moved on:

">“If we demolish the government's monopoly on the supply of money and someone else supplies money and I want some of that money? What do I buy it with? Whose money?”

Okay, money is the generally accepted medium of exchange, which means that other things are exchanged against money. So the price of all those myriad goods and services, is expressed in money. But the “price” of the money that is exchange for them, is not expressed in money, it’s expressed in the particular array of those other goods and services which it is able to purchase in a given transaction.

In other words, the “price” of money is the purchasing power of money (PPM). You "buy" money with the goods or services you exchange for it."

Not necessarily. I can assure you that the price for the money I received for a mortgage was, by the time the mortgage was cleared, about twice the amount of money I bought.

">Extremely profitable? How so? What, in the money that they've issued? That can't be right…
Why not?"

Because it's impossible to have more of the same money that you've issued then you've, well… issued. Or are you imagining some version of quantum physics applying to this issued money?

tbc:

">Because this good money can't be the same thing as the government's bad money so it must be something different and therefore would not be a lowest common denominated currency.

Why not?"

Because A is not B. Therefore it is different.

">“Everything is changeable, up to and including the Constitution - by simply convincing sufficient voters of the efficacy of your concepts, Jardine. Since everyone's supposed to act only in their maximal self-interest this should be pretty simple if it's all as hunky dory as you intimate. Exercising their user preferences as it were.”

That assumes that the State is more representative of the people, or of society, than those people, or society, are of themselves.

It isn’t. If you want to run that argument, you need to refute all these arguments first: “Unrepresentative government”"

I need refute no such thing. I made a factual statement.

Your uninterest in or incapacity to bother pursuing such a course of action is entirely your prerogative.

"The line of reasoning seems to be: “The government does it because it’s good, and we know it’s good because the government does it.”"

Or we could characterise it as the will of the people evolves and is expressed through government over time.

But I accept that you seem to have no theory of adaptive social cooperation beyond individual action and would disagree.

"“I'm not aware that you're being denied the prospect of emigration …”
Why should I?… "

Forget I attempted a display of empathy with a proffered solution. By all means stay and be unhappy.

"“Maybe there are some things worse than fiat currency.”
Like what? Your argument seems to be only “might is right”."

Kardashians, terrorist bomb murderers, osteo carcinoma, psychopaths who enjoy torturing kittens… Lots of things.