But why can't anyone invent their own currency!!!
Overtime, even after the invention and operation of real money, people in crisis such as war have invented items or modes of exchange such as the cigarette currency in the Prisoner of the War Camp. This has disguised a market situation and aided trade but however there is increasing debate on whether these invented means of payments and medium of exchange can be regarded as mere money, near money or no money at all but tools that aid barter trade.
The debate has for long been tainted with the popular premise of likening everything used in exchange to money and the arguments become more grounded when such means of payment have a monetary value, are durable, portable and divisible. We need to delve inconsequentially, analyze critically and explicitly, into the details that guide the arguments that will either qualify or disqualify invented currencies as money.
"The difficult question as to the best definition of money has been complicated by the efforts of writers so to define the term as to give support to their particular theories. It is hard to frame a precise account which will hold good of the many objects that have served for monetary purposes. Money has come to include anything that performs the money work". This phrase overstates the discrepancy that enrobes the fashion of defining what money is exactly and makes efforts of addressing the dichotomy trickier. Money fails to reveal its true nature for two reasons. The difficulty to agreeing on a main definition of money is due to two reasons:
The first is that, at the deepest level, it is independent of any transactions in which it is used. The second reason, which is complementary to the first, is that money, as soon as it is used for any purpose, generates its own distinctive institutions. As for the second reason, the possible uses of money, and the different functions which money must have to support them, are never random. However wide the range of different uses, the form must always be institutionalized. At the present stage it is sufficient to note that money because of its extreme generality and consistency as a phenomenon can be functional only if its use in any case is highly specific.
Moving forward, the nature and element of money is one, according to arguments, is immersed in the monetary nature of whatever is used as money and the diversion and extent to which it can alternatively have a non-monetary attachment. The fact that in any culture the phenomenon of money is only and always manifest in transactions and institutions has meant that in practice thinking about money is determined by the character of these manifestations, although this is seldom made explicit. This is the basis of what is commonly called 'monetary theory', which forms the dominant view of the phenomenon of money.
By taking the institutions for granted, the monetary theorist is seduced into accepting, as axiomatic, a number of statements about money, which are at most true only in a limited range of monetary systems.
Money is essentially a uniform phenomenon, which can become manifest only when it occurs within the confines of an established institution. Although it is the institutions which give money meaning or purpose, its true nature though not necessarily the forms in which it becomes manifest is independent of any of them. This being so, the institutions have to be presented in all their diversity, so as to establish, convincingly, that not one institutional configuration can be definitive.
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