Inflation is Money?

To those who subscribe to the modern dogma of Economics, please brace yourselves for the following.

I was playing Monopoly® with a child the other day. Although there were no questions about play from the four-year-old, I was curious to actually read the instruction to a game we usually played off-the-cuff.

Interesting to find that it was based on a wholly unsound understanding of economics, to the point where I can call it naive. It's merely a game, but look at some of the game-scoped tenets:

1. You can only borrow from the bank, and
2. The bank never goes bankrupt.

I get the point.

1. You can only borrow from the bank, and
2. The bank never goes bankrupt.

I mean, the point is that everyone shall be dependent on the bank for exigent funds, or any funds. And, well, the banker can resort to making negotiable money out of scraps of paper.

As the child was buying everything in sight, and then mortaging those holdings to buy something else, I thought about a scenario similar to the free money concept...

...the Star Name certificate.

I'm surprized that anyone would expend one-half to two hours of their labor (quite a bit more if they desire the spiffy parchment) on a printed piece of paper, but TV commercials do not pay for themselves.

Sure you could ask a middle school-aged child (or a four-year old) to lookup arbitrary coordinates of a star and design a certificate, and print their work at Kinkos or any drug store for less than 0.0009 ounces of gold (value of today's dollar). Or you could grab one from Free Name a Star.

But that is not the point. The significant point is that if that Star Name certificate were forced on you by a bank to use as currency, then, as a good friend, I advise you expend many hours of your labor in buying stock or private equity in the businesses behind the following websites because they have unlimited potential:

http://www.starmoniker.com/
http://www.nameastarlive.com/giftsets.asp
http://www.nameastar.net/
http://www.starregistry.com/
http://www.starnamer.net/

Better than that, we all ought to start printing our own Star Name certificates before the Gov'ment (not that one, the other one) monopolizes it (no pun intended) because there's gold in them 'thar papers!

Hmmm... on second thought, maybe this post is not as offensive to those who majored in the study of Economics.

Oh yea, if you didn't catch the similie between unbacked United States Dollars and unbacked Star Name certificates, then, well, now you did.

But that similie justly begs the question, "Is Monopoly only a game... or is inflation really money?"

Crap. There's the word my Economized friends find so offensive from my mouth: inflation. My apologies?

Also, for your edification only, with the honest money of old, 0.0566 ounces of gold was synonymous with one dollar. You can check for yourself, but that's not a huge difference between now and then if you print the money, or ... the ... Star Name certificates. Now I'm lost, what was the point?

I think it was to figure if I ought to expend my tangibly valueless money, on their tangibly valueless Star Name certificates. Sounds quid pro quo to me.