you cannot make contracts in gold, and expect them to be enforced.
Two flaws with this argument of Nozick's:
1. by accepting or requesting external enforcement of your contracts, you're opting into the general social contract;
2. well of course people wanted to use gold to settle. the claimholders had got there first and there was a lot of gold to be had. If California was a separate country, it would have just resulted in a social contract where only gold was acceptable, because that suited gold-holders.
You know, if you happen to sit atop a diamond mine, then you probably think everyone should be willing to accept diamonds as payment. If I sit atop a diamond mine and you don't, you probably feel otherwise.
1. I'll give you that since it doesn't really effect the point I was disproving -- that government is need to print and regulate currency.
2. That is the incorrect conclusion to draw, they didn't want to accept dollars because the new that the government would inflate their value away as every government that has ever existed has done without fail.
'They' in 2. being the people who controlled the alternative money supply, ie the gold. C'mon, don't you think there might have been even a little bit of self-interest at work there?
Two flaws with this argument of Nozick's:
1. by accepting or requesting external enforcement of your contracts, you're opting into the general social contract;
2. well of course people wanted to use gold to settle. the claimholders had got there first and there was a lot of gold to be had. If California was a separate country, it would have just resulted in a social contract where only gold was acceptable, because that suited gold-holders.
You know, if you happen to sit atop a diamond mine, then you probably think everyone should be willing to accept diamonds as payment. If I sit atop a diamond mine and you don't, you probably feel otherwise.