Dotzilla wrote:
maybe i'm continuing to miss your point, but i don't understand how paper money can be a representative of an economy backed by trees. you need to harvest the trees for the paper. paper money can't be a representative, right? it IS the money.
What Usd said. Even assuming it actually took trees to make bills, you seem to be presuming that we must necessarily cut down all trees to make sufficient paper to represent them.
Dotzilla wrote:
also, i really don't know anything about economy but the ability to just grow more money sounds like it would inflate things. you want to buy 1 tomato, which costs 2 trees. you only have 1 tree. you grow another tree. now you have 2 trees, but you didn't contribute to the economy to gain that second tree. you didn't "work" for it, in the market sense.
The tree has, and represents, value. Economy is exchange of value.
This basic principle holds true whether the currency is backed by gold, trees, or faith in the government.
Dotzilla wrote:
like i said, i don't know much (or anything, really) about economics, but it seems like if we had the ability to just make gold it's value would fall considerably. the value of a precious metal is determined by it's rarity. which is why warren buffet has a 350 million dollar iridium wedding ring. lolz
We do have the capacity to make gold, by means of a process called mining.
Gold, like any other naturally occurring resource, isn't "made" until it's processed into a form that can be packaged, used and/or sold.
This is one of my criticisms of the gold-based currency: it would lead to over-investment in exploration and make countries like Burma or South Africa richer than the US/EU/PRC overnight for absolutely no good reason. Not to mention that with today's advanced technology, gold-backed currency would lead to investment in pointlessly creative new ways to make gold (such as refining sand and seawater) that would serve no productive purpose.
In the case of trees, though, we do have an interest in finding a way to ensure that more are produced. And as almost all economic activity today comes with a direct environmental tradeoff, usually via deforestation or CO2 emissions, using trees as currency would create an economic vehicle that could not only compensate for the damage, but perhaps, over time, even reverse it to a considerable extent, reforesting large areas and restoring groundwater, while ensuring an even higher standard of living than we have today.
