ABSTRACT
Expectation and determinacy are incompatible and mutually exclusive. The rational ideal must therefore exclude expectation, and expectation, since it is real and insistently present and accompanies all activity, must destroy the rational ideal. A money-using economy is one which acknowledges the permanent insufficiency of the data for rational choice. Money is the means of stopping half-way in the complete transaction of exchange, the means of avoiding or postponing the hazardous and expectational choice of a concrete, specialized asset whose value is a conjecture about the relation of its design to future technology and markets. The ultimate price-indeterminacy which follows logically from the fact of expectation is, of course, heavily restrained and modified by other aspects of the business of being, and keeping, alive, aspects which are no less fundamental. The observed existence of speculative markets where temporary price-stability is nevertheless established, proves that expectation-forming of a non-logical kind occurs.
