Marveling at Modern Money

Let us never forget how amazing our modern world is, and what a marvel of human genius our economic system is, with its circulating paper currency, and now, plastic-electronic currency of flowing electrons. We forget how recently it was that human civilization created circulating paper currency, and all our other modern economic marvels. In america, in the eighteen twenties, nearly a half century after independence, most of the country was still relying heavily on english currency, schilling, pence, pounds, and all that. This was because there was no existing circulating national currency; each state was responsible for its own currency system, the only paper money consisted of drafted banknotes and checks, which were more widley used and accepted than any circulating currency, other than gold and silver coins. Financial transactions betwwen places like virginia and new york could, and did, get a bit tricky. The plain is that the american people, right from the git go, did not trust their own central government enough to give it the power to issue and regulate a nationwide circulating paper currency. The distrust we americans have of govermne tnow is certainly nothing new, nor, for that matter, is the political betterness and divisiveness which permeates public discourse and divides us. Humans began by bartering, food for work, land for cattle; coinage, symbolic wealth, made things easier when humans became neolithic. The original idea was that the actual coin itself was actually equal, in dollar value, to the work or commodity for which it was being exchanged, and that basic idea continue right up to the nineteen seventies, and the eliminatin of the "gold standard" as a measuremnet of the value of currency. Now, currency values, all currency values, fluctuate according to the markep, and do not remain rigid and fixed against the price of gold no matter what. Now, we have all this flexibiliby, the flexibility of instantaneous transactions over thousands of miles, computerized storage of all, meaning "all" information, and the magnificent fiction that is modern money can be used as a way to fulfill all our dreams. Its like Einstein said, the greatest invention of mankind is compound interest. The mathematics behind compound interest are inherent in nature, just a a base ten arabic numberins system, in a sense, is a "discovery", rather than an "invention", but still....to apply the mathenatical principle to real money, (real/imaginary money)...as a stroke of human genius. We can now do anything we want, economically. Maybe we should do what's needed to make us healthy and happy, rather than impoverished, angry, and miserable.