Owing to the fact that money, when serving as the standard of price, appears under the same reckoning names as do the prices of commodities, and that, therefore, the sum of 3£ 17s. lO½d. may signify, on the one hand, an ounce weight of gold, and on the other, the value of a ton of iron, this reckoning name of money has been called its mint-price. Hence, there sprang up the extraordinary notion that the value of gold is estimated in its own material, and that, in contradistinction to all other commodities, its price is fixed by the State. It was erroneously thought that the giving of reckonning names to definite weights of gold is the same thing as fixing the value of those weights.[1] In so far as gold serves as one of the elements in determining price, i. e., where it performs the function of money of account, it not only has no fixed price, but has no price whatever. In order to have a price, i. e., in order to express itself in a specific commodity as a universal equivalent that other commodity would have to play the same exclusive
- ↑ Thus, we read, e. g., in the "Familiar Words" of Mr. David Urquhart: "The value of gold is to be measured by itself; how can any substance be the measure of its own worth in other things? The worth of gold is to be established by its own weight, under a false denomination of that weight—and an ounce is to be worth so many pounds and fractions of pounds. This is falsifying a measure, not establishing a standard."
reminds of the "leges barbarorum," in which, inversely, certain sums of money were expressed in terms of oxen, cows, etc. In that case neither gold nor silver, but the ox and the cow were the actual material of the money of account.
