Talk:Metal as money

message: The way this article is written is pretty much straight-up gold-buggery, usually without a source because the people writing it feel the value of gold is held to be self-evident.
The reality is that gold is a commodity, and if you want to argue it's a particularly stable or intrinsically valuable commodity that's fine, but it's subject to the laws of economics rather than the laws of economics prostrating themselves before it as a golden calf.
To pass any historical or NPOV muster at all, the special status of gold has to go. The mental price you have on it is inappropriate historically; even with the other precious metal of reference for modern global citizens, silver, the price has fluctuated from as high as par or above par to as low as the ratio shortly before the current gold speculation glut. Before the development of world trade, the value of ANY commodity, gold included, was rigidly defined by a mix of mild cultural influences and heavy material influences.
Gold has been used by a relative minority of commercial actors even in areas where it has been used extensively as money. The highest volume of trade in specie money was in fact in silver - China had little demand for gold as money, even during the heyday of specie-and-specie-backed global trade. Neither gold nor silver nor any of their largely irrelevant allies have a monopoly on commodity money; salt and rice aren't metals, but iron and copper are, along with brass, bronze, and steel - each used extensively in Africa, in large part due to the tremendous glut in gold in the economically dominant Sahel market.
Even before bothering with how obsessively negative this article is about means of exchange that can't double as electrical wiring, it needs to stop telling the audience that precious metals (pronounced 'gold') are of intrinsic value in a manner familiar and comfortable to them throughout the whole of human history, for gold's is the power and the glory, forever and ever, world without end. A strong plurality of people have used metal as a means of exchange, but a pretty weak percentage have ever handled gold as money.
Also, it'd be good to cover debasement and attendant inflation, which is a fact of life for every metal used as currency. (What, you thought Gresham's Law was meant to be about wicked, terrible, no-good paper money?) The late Roman empire passed off as little as half an as worth of silver as a denarius, and the attendant devaluation of the accepted units of account produced an eternal mill of redenomination and revaluation. This caused slave rebellions, catalyzed civil strife and warfare, and ultimately helped pull the Empire apart.
This is the problem with encyclopedic writing as political advocacy. It lacks historical context, it makes mistakes excusable only by rhetoric rather than facts, and it ultimately comes to a preordained conclusion and acts surprised at doing so. The history of metal money is rich and varied and here it is a pamphlet for Gold, the Once and Future King. If that's what you insist on, retitle it and be done with it.
70.173.153.6 (talk) 10:55, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  An historical obsession with gold