Money

I've been thinking about money: it's had its chance, bring back older systems.

Money looks like a good idea. A dollar easily divides into a hundred cents; a pig requires a lot of effort to become a hundred sausages. A hundred dollars fits into a wallet with room to spare; a hundred dollars of wheat needs a forklift. The problem is, money is really easy to tax. Barter protects itself so much better. If I paid all my bills in Perl source I wouldn't mind paying 5% to the government (in fact, they can have all the whitespace and parentheses they want*).

I assert the early monetary and barter systems failed because the system was introduced too early. All those little bronze tokens of tiny animals and tools were a great idea, the civilizations at the time were just too primitive to use them effectively. First, the agricultural base was too small to support liberal arts graduates. Who else has the talents to detail these tiny tokens (well those geeks who paint miniatures, but goblin warlock production makes up a very tiny portion of GDP).

Without sufficient detail you can't tell what a token stands for. Just think of all the trouble a tiny bronze disk with a whole in the center would give an ancient Mesopotamian. Is it a stone wheel? worthless. Stone cars get horrible gas mileage; litter-bearing slaves is much more environmentally friendly. Is it a CD? probably worthless. You'd wait a few millennia for the CD player to be invented just to learn it's someone's photograph collection.

* Lisp and Python programmers are out of luck. Should have learnt a real language.