The ancient Greeks and Julius Caesar were better masters of money than European monarchs since they chose copper over gold.
Copper is lighter than gold to carry around. Copper is a better method of issuing coin money because it was difficult to counterfeit, unlike paper money or gold certificates. Copper makes for a better coin than gold since it isn’t worth the effort to casually clip or shave copper coins, which was problematic for the monarchs to pay for the replacement of shaved and clipped gold coinage. Copper is also easier to manage for inflation and deflation since copper is more readily available than gold.
Furthermore, a coin could function as a legal instrument to represent the economic activity of those who used the coins to trade rather than function as a commodity. The copper in a penny today is worth more than the copper. The copper in the Roman penny was worth less than the coin.
Artistotle and Plato were correct. Money is merely a statist or legal instrument to facilitate barter for the public and to be used for the funding of government. Money is a public, legal good. Gold and copper are not money. They are commodities. The historical value of gold and copper used in coins or certificates show that money isn’t a commodity but a legal good, whose supply should ideally be managed to prevent inflation and deflation. The changing supply and demand of a commodity causes inflation and deflation. One should use price indexes to make sure the supply and demand of the money are not causing inflation and deflation by managing the supply.
With modern information technology, the statistical ability to manage the supply of money to prevent inflation and deflation is much better than the Roman empire so there is no reason to use any commodity to help manage the value of the money. Furthermore, today’s anti-counterfeiting technology makes paper even better than copper since it is even cheaper to use paper than to use copper and since nobody will be shaving, clipping, or melting the paper down for the paper’s intrinsic value.
Copper is the Achilles’ heel of the goldbugs since copper makes for a better coin and hard currency than gold. There is nothing special about gold which makes it an ideal currency. The rarity of gold is actually the main weakness of gold as currency, not it’s strength. Julius Caesar recognized this fact and built the Roman Empire on copper coinage, while the European monarchs had to keep stealing gold to replace and expand the supply of gold coins. Rome also collapsed when they finally did go on a gold standard. Rome was built on copper as money and destroyed with gold as money.
The hard currency advocates had to keep fractional reserves of gold and issue debt or debase the value of gold as currency by adding the use of silver and other precious metals into circulation, until it grew into it’s current form of pure fractional reserves of debt, corrupting the purpose of pegging and backing the currency to a commodity, to avoid the massively destructive deflationary nature of gold, as well as the counterfeiting of certificates, clipping and shaving of coins, and reserve fraud. The bankers finally dumped the special interest of precious metal miners and traders and maintained the bigger special interest of hard currency, the debt aspect. Nations can’t print gold. They have to borrow it at interest from the bankers — a negative sum game where even if the nation increases economic production, the interest grows more expensive on the gold because of deflation.
