>>71078
>What sustains the value of any currency, in that case, is the stability and reliability of the sovereign issuing and approving it. Rather than labor or subjective desire, currency reflects the “value” of sovereign security. If the sovereign will accept a certain amount of money to settle your tax bill, and maintains an orderly circulation of money, the value of money will reflect that.
Do you even Menger and Mises, you fool? Menger found out how barter economies develop currencies, and at no point is a sovereign of any sort involved. Mises found out that money retains its purchasing power because it had purchasing power in the past (for reasons Menger described), and people predict from this that it will retain purchasing power in the future.
Graeber was wrong to challenge any of that, and in fact his arguments completely miss the mark, for the most point, for reasons that I and many others have outlined in this thread. And as Tom Woods pointed out, what little evidence Graeber has that is somewhat relevant is not supporting his viewpoint. He did not, in fact, show that the first currencies were fiat. He at most showed that this is a possibility, but even that is a far too benign interpretation.
If Graebers theory was correct, then we would never expect a fiat currency to fail (when that has clearly happened, most obviously in Zimbabwe and Weimar), and we would not expect any currency to spring up that was actively battled by the state (also something that happened in places like Zimbabwe). By any standard - historical, a priori, "scientific" - Graebers theories fail. And I cannot take any economist serious who takes him serious.