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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >Many would say that your jug of rum has no intrinsic value, unless there 
> was someone who desired to get drunk, just as the same person might desire 
> a 
> gold ring or necklace.  
> 

Yes, Bob, and I call those people .... hmmmm ...er .... people without a 
great deal of critical thinking.  Saying rum has no intrinsic value unless 
you 
plan to get drunk is as idiotic as saying water has no intrinsic value unless 
you 
want to avoid dehydration.  Do they understand what the word 'intrinsic' 
means??  To wit:

If you want a bauble, you can go to the creek and find a colorful pebble, a 
rock.  Your admiration of it is entirely in your head ... entirely.  It could 
be the gold neclace or a pebble on a string.

But if you want to get drunk, try going to the same creek and drink the 
water.  Not the same .... eh?  It's because there is a property of the rum 
that is 
different from that of the water, it is characteristic of rum, that is, it is 
intrinsic, doesn't depend on outside influences to be true.

Potatoes have intrinsic worth.  Try going to that same creek and eating the 
rocks.  The potatoes will supply calories, protein, and enough vitimin C to 
keep away the scurvy in the winter.  Does the rock do that?  No.  So the 
potato 
has intrinsic worth and the rock does not.

A stack of firewood can raise the temp in my house from freezing to 68 
degrees (what it is now).  Go to the creek and take up the sod on the bank.  
Can it 
do the same thing?  No.  The wood has intrinsic worth that the sod does not.

It shows how utterly detached from reality that someone is when they equate 
admiring a gold ring to avoiding starvation.  Under the right circumstances 
that person would trade a bushel basket of gold rings for a potato.  But 
would 
you, under those same circumstances, trade a bushel basket of cabbages for a 
single potato?  The difference there spells out the nature of intrinsic worth 
vs. 
imagined worth.

>> Gold 'has' been used as a medium of currency and as a 'store of wealth' 
> for millenia, but you are right that you can not eat the stuff. 

And you are not entirely correct that it has been thus used for millenia.  
The use of gold comes and goes.  I've had this discussion many times before.  
There were times in history when gold was just about worthless.  In most 
cases 
in the past, the value of gold was enforced by some government or the other 
and 
without that it may or may not have any value.

My example of this is that you are familiar with R.L. Stevens story Treasure 
Island.  There was tons of gold there, but what good did it do anyone on the 
island?  The goal of both the protagonists and the pirates was to get the 
gold 
back to England where the government enforced a value system giving the gold 
a 
monetary worth.  Unless you have that enforced system of values, the gold is 
worthless as money.

Saying that gold has always been a store of wealth is to say that people have 
always harobored the hope that they will be able to hold onto their gold 
through evil times until there is a stable monetary system that will enforce 
the 
gold's value.  During bad times the self same similar hope in others is the 
only thing that gives gold a trade value.

James