Money

Abstract

Property cannot be exchanged or valued without money, and the potential for property as a store of value is only realized with money, as Locke recognized. The definition of money is the subject of commentary among many theorists, including Aristotle and Locke, as well as Smith, Marx, and Keynes. For example, Aristotle, Smith, and Marx distinguished between use value and exchange value of a commodity, or oikonomia and chrematistics respectively in Aristotle’s terms, only the latter of which was expressed in monetary units (Marx 1970, 27). Money is often defined by its functions, as a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value, by modern theorists. Wray sees money as the debt of the government, which is accepted in payment of taxes (Wray 2012, 261–281). Kindleberger notes the ambiguity of the definition of money, even in the nineteenth-century Money School in England (Kindleberger 1989, 60–65).