Reading Justinian Digest,& came across this.Q for lawyers out here,is it saying the following?"a claim on money is only a numerical claim, contrary claims on commodities. As such a monetary claims does not involve weighing, merely counting by tale."
@rohangrey @NathanTankus
A few other nominalistic passages: Here is Ulpian telling us that all denarius coins are the same, a contract cannot stipulate which specific denarius to receive, contrary to merchandises.
Here is Javolenus saying that Valoristic principles do not apply, i.e. a loan contract cannot link a monetary sum to a fixed quantity of goods (i.e. in case of inflation, debtor does not need to compensate creditor for loss of purchasing power)
Daniela's and George's make me think of two papers I wrote long ago about that period of time. FDR was a fiscal hawk who reluctantly used planning to manage the economy. I'll develop in a bit.
The two papers are:
“Job Guarantee and Its Critiques: Insights from the New Deal Experience.” International Journal of Political Economy, 42(2), 2013: 63-87.
“Minsky and Economic Policy: ‘Keynesianism’ all over again?”In The Elgar Companion to Hyman P. Minsky. Edward Elgar. 2010
Minsky was heavily influenced by Keynes but rejected the Keynesianism of the 60s a la fine tuning ("bastard Keynesianism").Keynes = planning full employment and investment.
The Minsky paper goes on to study Keynes's influence on the Roosevelt Era and Kennedy-Johnson Era
Finishing to review a couple of papers on MMT related topics and this leads me to share a few things. If you equal MMT to QE, fiscal dominance and/or a push for monetary financing to accommodate its other policies, then you need to improve your understanding of MMT. 1/
MMT proponents are explicitly against QE, they want to keep the central bank balance sheet small and nibble (See for example Fullwiler and Wray 2010 paper on QE) 2/
MMT proponents do not analyzed the Treasury-Central bank interaction in terms of a game. Rather they analyzed it institutionally & conclude that there is a routine & old coordination between the two entities. 3/
Koopman:"Money is not a uniform but a dualistic phenomenon:'medium of exchange' or 'medium of payment' on the one hand and 'unit of value' [...] on the other hand are not two 'functions' of one and the same thing,'money',but rather two different objects of knowledge." CORRECT
Translation in English: There can't be a means of pay and medium of ex without a unit of account first (because the first two r denominated in the latter). So "money" is not a list of functions that is either this or that. Monetary system = unit of account + monetary instruments
Monetary instruments can be used in a variety of functions, be of any made of any kind of material, be immaterial, change their relation to the unit of account, etc, etc.
Knapp's State Theory of Money quick summary (leaving aside exchange section):
1-There are /= payment systems ("pay-society") that may or may not use the same unit of account (UA) & means of payments (MP). Banks & state are two main ones.The state has“the oldest society of payers”
2-“Money always signifies a Chartal means of payment”, Charta = token/ticket defined by law. Banks issue private chartal means of payment, the state issues its own. They circulate by tale ("chartality") instead of weight ("pensatory")
3-The state may accept in its payment system some MPs it doesn't issue,hence his point that private bank notes“form part of [the state] monetary system”,which greatly increases their area of circulation(NOTE: he is NOT saying that state acceptance defines what money is,that is 2)
Have been working on a specific topic of the history of thought of monetary theory: nominalism and financial approach (instead of functional approach) to monetary systems. The goal is to trace back the origins of these ideas all the way back to the Greeks. 1/
Got to say to say it is not easy because most of the authors that work on these topics are usually completely ignored in well-known "Money" treatises so you've got to go off the beaten paths and hang of a few references here, or luck, to hopefully get something 2/
Authors such as Innes, (thomas) Smith, James Taylor, among others do not appear anywhere or are at best briefly mentioned. The commodity theory, medium of exchange, metalist view are being presented as the serious way to do monetary analysis. 3/