ABSTRACT
The world has known precious-metals money for millennia. Through the ages from ancient times, monetary devices have evolved spontaneously for much the same reason that wheels, levers, calculators, and other such innovations have also appeared: they significantly reduce the real costs of living and thereby add to the total product that people can enjoy. Commodity money reached its evolutionary zenith with the multinational adoption of the gold standard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gold, although coined frequently, did not become a standard for at least the first thousand years of coinage. In practice, however, the “endless change in the [market] ratio of gold to silver, necessitat[ed] continual revision of the [official] rate of exchange”. The evolution of metallic commodity moneys to metallic standard moneys coincided at times with the evolution of individual rights to life, liberty, and property, and constitutional government.
