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

By your own admission, they don’t only cover legal tender.

If the State, by instrument of law, makes itself the only supplier of money that is capable of being “identified” as “legitimate” payment, then obviously it’s a monopoly, and your entire rebuttal collapses.

As for your idea that exchange can take place in other media of exchange, that doesn’t make them money – cream puffs and dildos.

Besides, the entire general issue is what makes a payment “legitimate” if one party to the transaction doesn’t agree to it but for the legal tender laws. Your argument is only that the legal tender law “identifies” legitimate payment, and what makes payment legitimate is the legal tender law!

You’re just going round and round in circles.

You haven’t begun to establish that legal tender laws confer a general social benefit, and haven’t begun to deal with the issues whether the State has a conflict of interest with the rest of society in granting itself a monopoly. For example, in your blind assumption that legal tender laws must be beneficial, what account have you taken of the inflation of the money supply since they were introduced? Of the billions of dollars worth of real wealth transferred from the productive class to the State? Of the economic damage done by such inflation?

Wm Trevor

“As an experiment (given some of the discussion above) I did ask them if they'd take your dildos…”

The idea that something is money because it’s a means of exchange is Pericles’, not mine.

“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.”

What you bought the money for, was the array of goods and services you gave for it.

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

The supply of money can be profitable in the array of goods the supplier gets for it.

For example, the maker of money might make it for a cost to him of 100 units of a basket of consumer goodies. But he might be able to sell it for a profit to him of 105 units of the same basket of consumer goodies. An easy to understand example is the gumment. They make a 100 bill using a piece of plastic polymer and ink that costs virtually nothing. But they can pass it off in the marketplace for a profit of a much more valuable array of goods. That high profit is facilitated by its monopoly of issuing money. But a private provider would also be capable of supplying money at a profit, as with any other good. For example, see the thaler, a privately-issued silver money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler

“">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.”

But why must money be government-issued money in order to be a lowest common denominated currency?

“I made a factual statement.”

No you didn’t. You made a statement loaded with value judgments, and assumptions to the effect that the government is more representative of the people, than the people are of themselves. If you can’t defend your ideas, you should just say so, not take refuge behind evasive ad hominem nonsense.

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

That’s only more of your argument that might is right.

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

We could also characterize witch-burning as “the will of the people”.

But more importantly, the electoral system provides no evidence whatsoever that any given act of government represents the will of the people, so if the electoral system doesn’t provide it, what does? You're parroting brainwashed fiction.

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

It’s not about individual action versus social co-operation. If it was, you would have been able to show why the legal tender laws confer a general benefit; and why they don’t favour State agents at the expense of society in general. You haven’t even begun to join issue.

The issue is between voluntary social productive action, or coercive anti-social destructive action. You’re defending the latter. Perhaps you should think why for a change.

>“Forget I attempted a display of empathy with a proffered solution.”

It’s not a display of empathy to tell me to piss off if I challenge an abuse of power which you’re mindlessly trying but failing to defend. All you’ve done is personalise the argument to me when I have shown your assumptions to be without basis in evidence or reason.

>>"“Maybe there are some things worse than fiat currency.”
Like what? ...

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

Is that your main argument? So in other words, you *are" arguing that might is right.

All
Thus all the defences of government’s supply of money degenerate, on being challenged, into mere circularity, ad hom, and blind support of power for its own sake. Notice how no-one has made the slightest attempt to address the real issues, of the use by the State of money laws to channel untold billions of real wealth from the productive class to the political class; all by violating the rule of law and the liberties of the people?

I am a little surprised that you still don't get it, Jardine K Jardine, and more than a little suspicious that you are deliberately misrepresenting my position in order to validate your own.

>>If the State, by instrument of law, makes itself the only supplier of money that is capable of being “identified” as “legitimate” payment, then obviously it’s a monopoly, and your entire rebuttal collapses.<<

The State has a "monopoly", if you like to describe it so, only as the authority to determine what, and what is not, legal tender in Australia.

Legal tender being defined as the means of payment that you cannot refuse to recognize in the resolution of a debt, and not as the only means of payment permissible in law. I'm perplexed that you seem unable to grasp this very simple point.

It is only the "supplier" of money in the sense that it retains control of the issuance of legal-tender-conformant banknotes and coins, to ensure they are consistent with the laws that it has created.

>>As for your idea that exchange can take place in other media of exchange, that doesn’t make them money<<

We've been around this particular tree a number of times. You asserted earlier...

>>Therefore legal tender money is a species of the genus money<<

I couldn't agree more. And it would greatly help the discussion along if you gave examples of other species of money that happen not to be legal tender? I have offered promissory notes, which you have rejected for some reason you have yet to explain. You must have others in mind that I haven't considered.

So far, all we have determined is that the State has a rigid definition of what cannot be refused in payment of a debt. But that surely cannot be stretched to include all forms of money that may be used for the same purpose?

This discussion lacks your definition of money, together with some examples. Care to share?