The Nation’s Money

MONEY

 

            Money plays a central role in determining the course of our everyday life. Prices and inflation are directly linked to the nation’s money supply, and many economists believe that changes in the quantity of money also have important effects on the real economic variable, such as unemployment and gross domestic product, especially in the short run. Yet many of the models that economists use to evaluate fundamental questions relating money and monetary policy to economic activity tend to gloss over the underlying characteristics of the economy that motivate the use of money. Economic models that simply assume currency is valued overlook these characteristics and possibly the important properties of money that influence the way its supply affects the economy. Understanding these properties will provide a better idea of not only the key features of money that associate it with “value” but also how those characteristics affect the link between the quantity of money and aggregate economic activity.

            This distinction between the good and the just is prefigured by Aristotle’s distinction. One treats property always as a means to some further end; it treats it teleological. The pursuit of money for its own sake is unnatural, but it provides an escape from the enslavement that is the necessary consequence of the perfectly natural association. To be natural, the city cannot be a perfect whole. The perfection of the whole would preclude the freedom of the parts. The household is what it is because it exists within a community; to attempt to model the community on the household is to make the mistake of thinking the household would remain what it is without the restraint of the society. Aristotle criticizes the explicit teaching of the Republic for not taking into account that, in a city where every woman of a certain age is your mother, you will in fact have no mother. There is no discoverable distinction between the good, understood as the useful, and the just. For Aristotle, according to whom nature never makes something with a dual purpose, does not mean to say that we have logos in order to make clear the useful and harmful and also the just and the unjust. He means, rather, that the purpose of logos is to make it possible to indicate the useful and the harmful so as also to indicate the just and the unjust. It is by indicating the use of things that we come willy-nilly to the question of justice and injustice. This is what it means for the household is the central ground of the good life.

 

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