E.G.

My Dad was pretty choosy when it came to ideas. If you wanted to persuade him of anything that he didn't already believe, you'd usually have your work cut out for you. But when he did find an idea he liked, he'd tightly embrace it. And his loyalty to the ideas he chose to embrace was unbreakable. Nowadays, he is no longer able to talk about these ideas that he loved, but I still remember the things he said to me.

***

Goldbugism was one of my Dad's ideas. This is the view that fiat currency is bad. Currency should be backed by gold or other tangible stuff of value. My Dad would have liked every dollar to be a certificate entitling the bearer to something of value. In his ideal world, if you had a bunch of dollars, you could show up to Fort Knox or someplace like that, and they'd give you gold, or silver, or something like that, in exchange for your dollars.

I believe that the person who first transmitted this idea to my Dad was a friend of his named Lou Bosso, but it might have been someone else. The idea was circulating long before Lou was born, and long before my Dad was born, and will continue to circulate long after all of us are gone.

My Dad got his goldbugism from somebody else but it makes sense to think of it as something that belonged to him. It did belong to him. He felt that way, and he wasn't wrong. He knew his personal goldbugism intimately. He knew it better than he knew any human person, I think.

***

I don't like goldbugism, myself. My Dad had other ideas that were good, but this one, I think, is bad.

But I think that reflection on goldbugism might be productive. I suspect there's a cool paper to be written about goldbugism, and its errors, and what those errors reveal about value, and free exchange, and consent, and honesty, and theft, and virtue, and what a good and just economic order would need to be like, and so on. Maybe that paper already exists.

***

My Dad would say that, in a fiat money system, every purchase that anyone ever makes is an act of theft. Say you give a five-dollar bill to a baker and they give you some bread. The baker gave you something of value (namely, bread), but all you gave them in exchange was a worthless piece of paper. That's theft, my Dad would say.

You might reply: By this logic, accepting a gift is theft, too. After all, gift-givers don't get anything of value in exchange for what they give. That's the whole point of gift-giving. But my Dad would say that accepting freely offered gifts is fine, because the gift-giver knows and intends that they aren't getting anything of value in exchange.

The problem with trades that occur in a fiat currency system, he'd say, is that the person who receives the money confusedly thinks they are getting something of value, but they are not. Buying bread with fiat currency is like buying bread with counterfeit currency.

In fact, he'd say that in a fiat currency system, all of the money is counterfeit, although no one knows it. And buying goods and services with counterfeit money is theft, if the seller doesn't know that what they're receiving is counterfeit money.

***

You might say: Even if all of the money in a fiat currency system is counterfeit, as my Dad maintained, it remains the case that no one (apart from goldbugs) knows it. And if you mistakenly think a counterfeit dollar is genuine, and then you spend it, then you haven't committed theft. So, the exchanges that occur in a fiat currency system aren't theft.

But my Dad would say that in the case where you unknowingly spend counterfeit money, you're still committing theft; you're just unknowingly committing theft. It's like if you take someone else's book home with you, mistakenly thinking it's yours. That's a kind of theft, he'd say. Maybe you shouldn't be blamed for it, but you still did the wrong thing.

So our fiat currency system has all of us unknowingly committing theft all the time, whenever we buy anything. That's what's wrong with the system, he'd say.

***

You might say: This line of argument assumes that fiat dollars are worthless, but that assumption is false. They're clearly worth quite a lot. After all, if you have a lot of dollars, you can use them buy valuable things, like cars and food and houses and so on. That gives them value. And that's why people work so hard to earn money. 

Whenever I made that objection to him, my Dad would usually concede that fiat currency has a kind of value. So, he'd retract, or refine, his initial claim that fiat dollars are "worthless."

He'd say that fiat dollars have the same kind of value that counterfeit dollars have. Counterfeit dollars are valuable, in a way. They're valuable to thieves. But they're not valuable to honest people. After all, an honest person would be unwilling to use counterfeit money to steal from people, so wouldn't have any use for counterfeit dollars, and therefore wouldn't value counterfeit dollars.

And he'd say that, in just the same way, fiat dollars do have a certain kind of value, because you can get goods and services in exchange for them. But it's not the kind of value that we honest folk should recognize, and certainly isn't the kind of value that we should have to spend all our working days pursuing.

He himself treated money in just the same way as everyone else. He thought dollars were worthless, but he still worked hard to earn them. And that is precisely the core of the problem as he saw it. A system of fiat currency forces all of us to assess value from a thief's perspective, rather than from the perspective of an honest person. So we all become thieves. We have no other choice. This is what I think he thought.

***

The argument bears some resemblance to Marxian arguments for and about the labor theory of value. Both arguments exhibit certain kinds of circularities. And reflection on the labor theory of value is fruitful, I think, even though the labor theory of value is in fact mistaken. I suspect that reflection on goldbugism may be similarly fruitful.