Zarlenga Views
Small ranchers would have neither the means to mint coins nor the trust of the community to accept them, so they would have to sell some of their cattle to a large rancher in exchange for coins to be used in case of emergencies, like toothaches. Zarlenga asks (p. 1), ld"Does [money] obtain its value from the material from which it is made, or from its acceptability in exchanges due to the sponsorship or even legal requirements of the government?erd" He clearly intends to prove that gold coins were never issued by merchants but only by governments. I agree. Wealth is power and the largest rancher in the community is the government. Or the government is the largest rancher, whichever way you want to look at it. In our example, the dentist did not issue the coin, the local cattle baron did.
Zarlenga writes (p. 4), fld"That such censorship [of the Greeks by the Romans] occurred in the monetary area appears likely. For example, in the Athenian Constitution coming down to us, we can find out how the garbage was collected, but we will search in vain to learn how Athens [sic] state coinage system was run. rd" Actually, I suspect that our copy of the Athenian Constitution is intact. The reason that we know so much about how they collected garbage is because that was the city governmentvrs"s only real job. They did not mint coins. Historians have focused on these glorified ragpickers in the city while overlooking the more interesting economic activity of minting coins that was being conducted by cattlemen in the countryside.
Casinos in Las Vegas will accept their competitorhrs"s chips (actually called tld"checks,ord" but I will say rld"chips rd" to avoid confusing them with demand deposits at banks) even though they are under no obligation to do so, and it is technically illegal under Federal law. Similarly, the several cattle barons who drove their cattle to the same city would come to accept each otherirs"s coins, provided that they were all the same weight, about 130 grains as recorded by Zarlenga. A cattleman would not want to lose a sale just because a customer had someone else rs"s coin. The cattleman could redeem it later through the clearing house at the local saloon where the cattlemen gathered. There it is easy to locate the issuer and trade coins straight across, with the balance to be delivered in cattle the next morning at the feedlot.
Thus, I will concede Zarlengacrs"s point that only governments and not merchants issued coins, but I would undercut his argument by observing that the cattlemen of antiquity did not divide their world into private-sector entities such as corporations and public-sector entities such as governments. Without firearms it would have taken, literally, an army to protect a cattle drive from thieves. Historians are unanimous in considering the presence of troops to be evidence of a government, so it is not surprising that Zarlenga claims that it was governments and not merchants who issued coins. But I would argue that what historians call a government was more like what we would call a corporation, but one with a military wing.
Zarlenga Images
