On Wed, 1 Oct 2014 20:30:50 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
.. .

The best antidote for that kind of thing is an understanding of what
money is, in a modern society, and how the supply of it is
constrained. I don't know of anything to recommend that gets right
to
the heart of it, but the primary insight about what money is was
explained in 1776 by Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations. My
edition
is 1072 pages of 18th century English, and I don't recommend it.
However, the satirist P.J. O'Rourke has written an excellent (no
kidding), readable, condensed version:

http://tinyurl.com/pmm7vfw
...
Ed Huntress

What do you thnk of Wiki's synopsis?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

Eh, I think it's too reductionist and too hard to follow.

The central point of the whole treatise is that the wealth of a nation
is the value of the goods and services it produces in a given amount
of time, not how much gold (or pots, in the example he used) it has.
From theories about money supply and our last century or so of
experience, we know that the amount of money that should be in
circulation, in order to avoid inflation or deflation, is some
multiple of that value of goods and services.

The multiple is a function of the "velocity factor," or a measure of
how many times money changes hands in a given amount of time.

The latter points were not stated explicitly by Smith, but are
consequences of his other theories.


This was a remarkable prediction of the Internet:

..."the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily
formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is
spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are
perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to
exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out
expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally
loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as
stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or
bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any
generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any
just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private
life... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state
into which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people,
must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent
it."