Looking to Locke (posted below) we see that there is a fundamental basis of all economic goods in both the creative productivity of man and God. Locke’s analysis of the roots of property rights views ownership, and one might infer the production of economic goods, as the result of the mixture of human effort or labor with the bounty of God’s creation. Now this process may be as simple as the act of picking an apple on common lands, whereby my labor as harvester is able to transform the apple into something owned by me, or as complex as building an automobile; but, after the raw material of God’s creation is transformed into property through labor, it is then an economic good, and I may use it in economic exchange.

What is extraordinarily interesting about money though is that it doesn’t seem to fit this model. Surely it did long ago when precious metals were mined and minted into money. Both labor and natural resources were used in the production of money. But this is no longer the case. Although money might sometimes take the form of coinage or paper currency, the materials in these products do not have much relationship to the essence of money. In fact, while at one time the paper notes produced by the Treasury Department used to represent gold and silver held in federal depositories, since Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971, and allowed the dollar to float on the full faith and credit of the United States Government, the last remnants of the connection money had to the natural world seem to have been severed. Money in the United States today, while sometimes represented in paper currency or metal coinage, is most fundamentally tracked and accounted for in what are called Fed Funds, with are electronic credits and debits, there is nothing behind them they are entires in the memory of a computer, and accounting, and no more, they are without material substance in themselves, even though sometimes materials are used to track them. Money in the modern economy is wholly the product of human invention. Alone among economic goods, money is not the result of a mixture of human activity and God’s creation.

I find this curious.