Money's not supposed to represent everything of value, it's an just abstract representation of value.
It's just much more stable if it's tied to something that has almost universal nominal value to most people. Like you have 10 cows and need a car, but the car salesman is vegetarian. Rather than barter in circles every time we need something we can instead habitually trade our specialty goods for a certain value of a good with near universal demand, which energy fits pretty well because we all like to have lights on in our homes (Amish not withstanding) and electricity is a near universal cost of modern manufacturing. Money is just an extra step of abstraction from that, where instead of having to physically have the goods in question, you can just have a reasonably secure promise that the money can be always traded for said goods.
I just don't see how you can tie it to multiple things unless they're inherently linked supply-wise, otherwise the value would get unstable if supply of one thing independently went up whilst the other went down.
It either has to be tied to one specific thing (gold/oil/etc.) or it becomes completely abstract again.
The value of a unit of currency is the total production divided by the amount of currency. It's abstract in the sense that it represents everything that is deemed as valuable. You just mint and spread the money around and people will, on their own, end up assigning money its value as they trade. It doesn't need to be tied to any indicator. The free market can assign the value through natural exchange.
It doesn't need to be tied to an indicator, but when it is it's a lot more resilient to the kind of manipulation that can happen when the market isn't allowed to be truly free, if for no other reason than because it puts physical limits on how far you can stretch the truth.
From where I'm standing the market hasn't been properly free for a veeeery long time, and with all the powerful information control and obfuscation tools in the pipeline, along with the almost universally expanding government powers in the west, it's not looking to get any more free any time soon. So I think there's still value in considering currency paradigms that work in real-world conditions as well as ideal ones.
Money's not supposed to represent everything of value, it's an just abstract representation of value.
It's just much more stable if it's tied to something that has almost universal nominal value to most people. Like you have 10 cows and need a car, but the car salesman is vegetarian. Rather than barter in circles every time we need something we can instead habitually trade our specialty goods for a certain value of a good with near universal demand, which energy fits pretty well because we all like to have lights on in our homes (Amish not withstanding) and electricity is a near universal cost of modern manufacturing. Money is just an extra step of abstraction from that, where instead of having to physically have the goods in question, you can just have a reasonably secure promise that the money can be always traded for said goods.
I understand the definition of money. The problem is tying it up to anything as specific as energy. It's not encompassing enough.
I just don't see how you can tie it to multiple things unless they're inherently linked supply-wise, otherwise the value would get unstable if supply of one thing independently went up whilst the other went down.
It either has to be tied to one specific thing (gold/oil/etc.) or it becomes completely abstract again.
The value of a unit of currency is the total production divided by the amount of currency. It's abstract in the sense that it represents everything that is deemed as valuable. You just mint and spread the money around and people will, on their own, end up assigning money its value as they trade. It doesn't need to be tied to any indicator. The free market can assign the value through natural exchange.
It doesn't need to be tied to an indicator, but when it is it's a lot more resilient to the kind of manipulation that can happen when the market isn't allowed to be truly free, if for no other reason than because it puts physical limits on how far you can stretch the truth.
From where I'm standing the market hasn't been properly free for a veeeery long time, and with all the powerful information control and obfuscation tools in the pipeline, along with the almost universally expanding government powers in the west, it's not looking to get any more free any time soon. So I think there's still value in considering currency paradigms that work in real-world conditions as well as ideal ones.