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06753_Field_TCUM T318.txt
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1996-04-10
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long as the hand of the individual clutches the material
stuff. It has become a much more abstract thing—just a
standard of value; and it only keeps this nominal status
by being handed round from time to time in quite small
quantities amongst a group of Central Banks, on the
occasions when one of them has been inflating or
deflating its managed representative money in a different
degree from what is appropriate to the behavior of its
neighbors.
Paper, or representative money, has specialized itself
away from the ancient role of money as a store of work into
the equally ancient and basic function of money as transmitter
and expediter of any kind of work into any other kind. Just as
the alphabet was a drastic visual abstraction from the rich
hieroglyphic culture of the Egyptians, so it also reduced and