Sublime

At the other end of the scale history reports that “the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.”34 So the bankers, watching the trends in agriculture, industry, and trade, inviting and directing the flow of capital, putting our money doubly and trebly to work, controlling loans

It was in the city‐states that humans could live with the freedom to work, produce, trade, and flourish, and that was to a large extent the result of these city‐states adopting a sound monetary standard. It all began in Florence in 1252, when the city minted the florin, the first major European sound coinage since Julius Caesar's aureus.

Government‐issued unsound money, however, can stall this process, keeping unproductive firms undead but not truly alive, the economic equivalent of zombies or vampires drawing on the resources of the alive and productive firms to produce things of less value than the resources needed to make them. It creates a new societal caste that exists accordi

L’ignorance. L’ignorance. Il ne faut pas sous-estimer l’ignorance et toujours penser à des intentions malignes. Non, simplement c’était l’ignorance. L’ignorance économique des hommes qui gouvernaient la France, à l’époque, était extraordinaire. Léon Blum inclus, bien que Léon Blum fût à sa manière un grand homme.

What happens when a nation willfully ignores perhaps the most fundamental lesson of economics and hopes that rent seeking will equal real prosperity? This does. What happens when a nation either loses, or prevents, a stabilizing middle class? This does. What happens when a government—any government—gets so out of touch with the governed? This does.

Whatever object humans chose as a store of value, its value would rise, and because more of the object can always be made, others would produce more of the object to acquire the value stored in it. The Yapese had O'Keefe bringing explosives and advanced boats to make more Rai stones for them and acquire the value stored in the existing stones. Afri

According to these calculations, the number of coins being minted in the late 60s BCE fell so sharply that there were fewer overall in circulation than there had been a few years before. The reasons for this we cannot reconstruct. Like most states before the eighteenth century or even later, Rome had no monetary policy as such, nor any financial in