/lit/ - Literature

>>21935337
>Money is used so you don't have to exchange shoes for potatos
'Money' is an overloaded term. Barter never happened, yet metal coins were invented at some point.

>For much of history the useless token was literally gold
For antiquity (because the Greeks and Romans needed a feedback mechanism for troops to self-supply via salary), and in the period after the Middle Ages.
For much of history, people relied on virtual credit and the forgiving of debts (with no mechanism to extract those debts forcefully). The peasants / tribal moieties would try to get indebted to each other, for the same reason you never completely repay debts to your parents - any such request would be seen as an insult.

That's why usury is so universally hated, it's the transformation of human tribal group bonding mechanism into forceful enslavement.

>>21829224
>you cant pay for things with air
That's not historically accurate. Medieval peasants literally traded with "virtual money", i.e. hand-crafted shit and sticks, which they arbitrarily assigned to be their "shillings", etc.

>>21829205
>how about we simply do capitalism: we use gold, we trade freely
In other words: "real capitalism has never been tried"?