Asia Times: The evil of the US dollar

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The evil of the US dollar
By Asif Salahuddin


Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say.


Imagine a large building full of about 50 people in a remote area, not accessible to other human beings.

Each person would need to have his basic needs - food, clothing, shelter and so forth, met. In doing so, each person would have to develop skills to go about earning his livelihood to support his needs. But it would be nonsensical for every person to develop each skill that is needed to survive. What would happen in reality is that each person would develop a few key skills and use these as his source of living; for example one person may specialize in growing crops and rearing animals, whist another may specialize in plumbing and carpentry.

Now these people would have to trade with one another to benefit from one another's skills. For example, the farmer may trade 10 chickens with the builder in exchange for him renovating his room, or a cleaner may trade half a day's cleaning in return for a knitter to knit two woollen jumpers for him.

As the number of skills or trades in the house (offered by the people resident there to one another) will be quite numerous, it would not only be very difficult and complex to keep track of all the exchange ratios between different goods and services, but also extremely impractical for day-to-day living.

Enter the use of a paper currency, which would remove the difficulties faced in exchanging goods and services with one another. From now on, for example, one hour's worth of cleaning could be assigned a value of one unit of the currency, a woollen jumper as five units, one chicken as three units and so on. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JK21Dj05.html