The Steel Standard

Bacon, beans, Benjamins, cake, cheddar, ducats, dinero, gelt, gouda, greenbacks, lettuce, loot, simoleons, smackers, stacks (fat, phat, or otherwise), ye olde filthy lucre. Money might be the root of all evil, but it also secures your food, clothing, and shelter. Money is what gets you things. To paraphrase one of the all-time great money villains, what’s worth you doing is worth doing for it.

Praise it or hate on it all you like — money is excellent at setting a standard value, and bless it for that. Human economies outgrew barter quite early in history. The miller of yore had to trust his customers to work out and honor the exchange rate of flour to tomatoes, or to shoes, or to candles, or to labor, or to whatever the hell else people who need bread might offer. Today a miller needs to know only how much money he’ll accept for a bag of his flour. Money also lets him store wealth. Instead of loading his cart with sacks of flour for every trip to Best Buy, our miller packs only his platinum card.

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