The use of a commodity such as money naturally 
increases its production. The nonspecialist economy of Virginia 
in the seventeenth century made the elaborate European 
currencies quite dispensable. Having little capital, and wishing 
to put as little of this capital as possible into the shape of 
money, the Virginians turned to commodity money in some 
instances. When a commodity like tobacco was legislated into 
legal tender, it had the effect of stimulating the production of 
tobacco, just as the establishment of metallic currencies 
advanced the mining of metals.

     Money, as a social means of extending and amplifying work 
and skill in an easily accessible and portable form, lost much of 
its magical power with the coming of representative money, or 
paper money. Just as speech lost its magic with writing, and 
further with printing, when printed money supplanted gold the