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Essay 3: Relativity of Values
(1936)
If, as stated, money is the mathematics of value, what is value? Value is the relativity of desire. It is arrived at in the mind by comparing one thing with another. Therefore, everything establishes its value in terms of something else or the same thing at a different time or place. A standard of value, in the sense of a fixed, commodity value, is impossible, since nothing is unchangeable in its desirability or relativity. This is not to say, however, that value has no unit. Value has a unit, even though it is not determinable. l~he smallest value, whatever it may be at any time, is the unit of value, or the numeral one.
Value is a common quality that runs through all commodities, but under the operation of the law of supply and demand, the content of value in each is constantly subject to change. The total, however, i.e. the sum of all the values in the universe of values, is changeless. The total of all values is no greater today, nor will it be greater tomorrow, than when mental appreciation or evaluation began. Whatever comes into life merely takes its proportionate part of the whole of value. Values vary quantitatively as fractions of the unchanging whole of value.
What actually takes place in trading is the determination of relatives of values, and this mental process is the act of moneyizing. It is a process of fractionizing or multiplying, depending upon whether the thing evaluated or compared is of greater or lesser desire than is the criterion of value. It is a mathematical process, and hence the statement that money is the mathematics of value.
As the act of moneyizing is psychological, so the act of monetizing is material, and it should be noted that both arise out of and do not antecede exchange. Hence trade produces money; money cannot produce or induce trade. The act of monetizing, i.e. creating the money manifest, is in essence nothing but an act of recording accountancy.
Now, taking arbitrary relatives, let us say that the tailor with a pair of trousers, undertaking to dicker with the wheat farmer, estimates his commodity to be worth five bushels of wheat, and that the farmer concurs in this. The tailor's unit of value is trousers, and to him a bushel of wheat is 1/5 of a unit. The wheat farmer's unit is a bushel of wheat, and he regards the trousers as five units. From this it may be seen that whether the unit is large and divisible or small and multipliable is immaterial; the relativity alone is essential in the act of moneyizing. The next day, the ratio, under the influence of supply and demand, might be 4½ or 51/2 to 1. This constant flux occurs within the totality of value.
The totality of value is fixed, but values (fractions) are volatile. They are uncapturable and uncontrollable, because they are subject to the mass mind, which has no stability and no governor. They cannot be shut off from the ceaseless agitation of public opinion. The same sum of value may abide in a cubic centimeter of matter as in a cubic yard, and tomorrow the substances of these cubes may hold widely varying value content. No commodity has a wall that can resist the ingress or egress of value. It is psychological; the minds of traders in concurrence govern the value content of all commodities. No physical measure nor psychological meter or control can be contrived. Commodities are the reservoirs of value, because value can abide nowhere else. But no one commodity can ever hold a fixed amount of value, and only the minds of traders can invest a commodity with value or divest it thereof. The total of value invests the total of commodities in constantly changing relativity. The concept of mathematical relativity of values is the concept of money.
Let us assume now that some marketers incline to take the sheep as the most desirable common commodity for a trading base or criterion. (Among the Romans it was the ox, or pecus, from which word pecuniary derives.) If we make the sheep 1, and adopt some arbitrary relatives, we might get under the decimal system the following:
Sheep 1, barrow of sand .10, shoes .50, trousers 1, harness 2, chicken .10, bushel of wheat .20, bushel of corn .10, cow 3, horse 5, candle .01, hog 1.
Thus the composite would total 14.01. At the particular time of this imagined meeting of traders' minds, the sheep, serving as the comparative criterion, or the numeral 1, represents about 1/14th of this universe of value. But almost during the time it takes to relate it, a change has taken place. Men's minds have changed, hence the relative value of the sheep has changed. Either more of value inhabits it, or some has escaped from it. But a compensatory deficiency or surplus abides else where in the total inventory. Nothing has been lost, nothing has been gained, except to the individual traders as owners of the commodities whose values have risen or fallen. In other words, the sum total of value is unchanging, and hence money, which is the mathematics thereof, is always co-extensive, never deficient and never excessive. As stated, the total of value in the example is 14.01. Had the candle been taken as the unit the total of value would have been the same, but the total of the mathematics of value-money-would have been 1401.
It is conceivable that the marketers, after gaining the concept of money as outlined here, might effect their exchanges without the scratch of a pen or a record of any kind. Their exchange would nevertheless be a perfect monetary exchange. Had they agreed to utilize some pieces of paper marked in a peculiar way for identification, and each trader had held, in advance of the trade, numbers of these pieces in ratio to the agreed value of their respective commodities, they would have materialized or monetized their money.
It is in taking the step from moneyizing to monetizing that every past effort of man has failed. He has invariably striven to perfect a standard of value, because he could not comprehend that exchange operates under the law of relativity, which knows no absolute. His monetary efforts have always miscarried, be cause he has tried to use as the monetary medium some intrinsically valuable commodity or a paper certification of a fixed measure of value. Since there is no fixed measure or standard of value identifiable with any commodity, the effort has been and must continue to be abortive. Since value exists in all things, and since value when mathematically compared is money, it is possible to convey money with gold or cheese or anything else, to the extent of their intrinsic value. The purpose, however, of a monetary medium is to isolate value accountancy from value itself, so that a sum of value may find its equivalent anywhere and not be related to specific things, all of which are constantly changing in their value content. That orientation is the quality wherewith money accomplishes its high purpose of emancipating trade from barter. Man's ignorance has to this day kept this spiritual weapon of liberation sheathed in a scabbard of materiality. The pure monetary medium, when it comes, will be an instrument intrinsically valueless, evidencing the transference of a value that is unidentified with any commodity, yet has a relative requisitionary power upon all.
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