alloy called electrum. It’s hard for anyone but a chemist (and there weren’t any) to tell how much gold is in a piece of electrum versus how much silver. The king of Lydia, Croesus, became proverbial for his wealth. In China, the weight of bronze “cash” was supposed to be guaranteed by death penalties. A lot of people must have gone to the electric chair (or would have if the Chinese had had electricity). A horse cost 4,500 “one cash” coins during the Han dynasty (206 B.C to 220 A.D.) and 25,000 cash during the Tang dynasty (618 A.D. to 907). It’s very hard for the people who issue cash to resist the temptation to debase that cash. Kings, emperors, and even lowly congressional government’s advantage to pay for those expenses with funny money. One reason that the concept of money so often violates common sense is that governments so often do representatives have expenses. It is to a
better as money than others. Celebrities would make bad money. Carrying a couple around would be a bother, and you would have to hack a leg off to make change. Precious metals, however, make good money and have been used that way for more than 5,000 years. Metal commodity money is portioned out by weight. A commodity money coin is just a hunk of precious metal stamped to indicate how
much it weighs. Moving from weighing
money to stamping coins is a simple step, but a couple thousand years passed before the step was taken. Nobody trusted anybody else to do the stamping. When coins were invented, the distrust proved to be well-founded. The first Western coins were minted by the kingdom of Lydia, in what is now Turkey. They were made of a gold-silver
24 | June 2017
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