Another glorious 1-2 punch about how abstract money gives government overnight access to citizen’s savings from page 102 of Broken Money: Inness (1914): “What is a monetary unit? What is a dollar? We do not know. All we do know for certain — and I wish to reiterate and emphasize the fact that on this point the evidence which in these articles I have only been able briefly to indicate, is clear and conclusive — all, I say, that we do know is that the dollar is a measure of the value of all commodities, but is not itself a commodity, nor can it be embodied in any commodity. It is intangible, immaterial, abstract. It is a measure in terms of credit and debt.” Lyn Alden, Broken Money: “Some economists such as Saifedean Ammous have argued that from a monetary perspective, World War I never really ended once it began in 1914. In prior wars throughout history, wars had to be funded with savings of taxes or very slow debasement of coinage. Physical coinage held by citizens could usually only be debased by their government gradually rather than diluted instantaneously, because a government couldn’t just magically change the properties of the coins that were held by households; it could only debase them over time by taxing purer coins, issuing various decrees to try to pull some of those purer coins in, and spending debased coins back out into the economy (and convincing initial recipients to accept them at the same prior value, despite the lesser precious metal content, which would only work for a time and might not even be noticed at first). However, with the widespread holding of centrally issued banknotes and bank deposits that were redeemable for specific amounts of gold, governments could change the redemptive value with the stroke of a pen or eliminate redemption all together. This gave governments the power to instantaneously devalue a substantial part of their citizens’ savings, literally overnight, and funnel that purchasing power toward war or other government expenditures whenever they determine that the situation calls for it.”