Page:Transactions NZ Institute Volume 10.djvu/51

Rh All writers on Political Economy call money wealth. By Mill's definition, and also by that which I have suggested, it is so. It is something useful, as an implement of commerce, and possesses exchangeable value. By my definitions it would also be called a commodity, but it is a commodity of which the actual cost is great and the proper cost is nothing. If the several nations composing the community who use gold and silver as a medium of exchange, passed a law that in future these should not be money but that certain printed pieces of paper should take their place, and that after the present holders of money had been presented with one of those pieces of pajper in exchange for each sovereign he possessed, no more should be printed except a small defined number to be printed annually in order to cover expected losses and to meet the expected increased demand due to increased commerce, we should have a new commodity costing nearly nothing and which would possess all the useful qualities possessed by money.

Metallic money is in fact like the water made by the chemist, a costly commodity, which is useful in the same manner, and only to the same degree, as another commodity which costs nothing.

It is not more wise to use gold as a medium of exchange, where paper would do as well, and to employ an army of skilful, intelligent, and enterprising workmen to dig it out of the ground, than it would be to employ the same men in quarrying minerals containing oxygen and hydrogen, and then to hire a chemist to mint them into water for household use, whlle, at the same time, a river was passing the doors. Whether wise or not, still it is done. Workmen are employed digging gold; when a man gets a nugget, he is entitled, by long established custom, to be rewarded by a tax, levied on the whole world, proportioned to the weight of the nugget. He has no trouble in levying this tax; he simply takes his nugget to a capitalist, who gives him such commodities in exchange for it as the miner may choose, and the nugget thenceforward, whether coined into money or not, is a token certifying that the bearer has paid directly, or at second or later hand a tax due by the whole community. Like all debts contracted by the community for unproductive expenditure, this debt is twice paid, or rather is still due although it has been already paid. The finding of the nugget did not increase the total quantity in the world, of those commodities which the miner took in exchange for it. All that he got must therefore have been taken from some one who would otherwise have got them. The consumers of those kinds of commodities, therefore, paid the debt, but they paid it to the manufacturer of the commodities, who got it in the shape of higher prices, instead of to the capitalist who advanced the goods to the miner. The latter was not paid, but the token he held being a