Poor on McCulloch
Thomas Allen
In 1877, Henry Varnum Poor (1812-1905) wrote
Money and Its Laws: Embracing a History of Monetary Theories, and a History of the Currency of the United States. He was a financial analyst and founder of a company that evolved into Standard & Poor’s. Poor was a proponent of the
real bills doctrine and the classical
gold-coin standard and, thus, the quality theory of money. He gave little credence to the quantity theory of money — especially if credit money, such as bank notes, were convertible on demand in species. Also, he contended that the value of money depends on and is derived from the value of the material of which it is made and with paper money, its representation of such value.
In the latter part of his book, he discusses leading monetary theorists from Aristotle (350 B.C.) to David A. Wells (1875). Most of the economists whom he discussed were proponents of the quantity theory of money. We will look at his discussion on John R. McCulloch. My comments are in brackets. Referenced page numbers enclosed in parentheses are to Poor’s book.
John R. McCulloch (1789-1864) was a Scottish economist, author, and editor. He was a professor of political economy at the University of London. Among his works are
Principles of Political Economy (1825),
Principles, Practice and History of Commerce (1831), and
A Description Statistical Accounts of the British Empire (1837). Poor reviews McCulloch’s notes to his edited work of Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nation (1828).
Poor introduces his review of McCulloch with:
Fully accepting the doctrines of [Adam] Smith, and the wide distinction which he made between the qualities of the precious metals which fit them for money and those which determine their value in exchange, he proceeds to consider the laws by which their value is determined when their movement is perfectly free; and those by which they are affected when artificial restraint is imposed upon it (p. 318).
McCulloch states that under free competition, the value of gold and silver depend on the cost of their production. The prices of commodities, i.e., their value measured in money, vary with their cost of production, supply and demand, and the cost of gold and silver to which they are compared (p. 318). When the supply of gold and silver is restricted, the supply of money is limited. He writes, “Whenever the supply of money is limited, its value varies in inverse ratio to its quantity as compared with the quantity of commodities brought to market, or with the business it has to perform” (p. 318). For that reason, if the supply of commodities doubles while the amount of currency remains the same, their price would be reduced by half. On the other hand, if the supply of commodities were reduced by half and the amount of currency remains constants, their price would double (pp. 318-319). Thus, money is merely a ticket or counter used to compute the value of property, and in transforming it from one to another. [McCulloch seems to confuse value with price. The two are different. Price measures value, but it is not value. Furthermore, some items, e.g., air, patriotism, and religious beliefs, have great value, but are not priced.] He claims “that a debased currency may, by first reducing, and then limiting its quantity, be made to circulate at the value it would bear were the power to supply it unrestricted, and were it of the legal weight and fineness; and, by still further limiting its quantity, it may be made to pass at any higher value” (p. 319). [History shows that when governments debase their currency, prices rise even if the supply is limited, which it seldom is.] He believes that nonconvertible paper money can be given a higher value than an equivalently denominated gold coin if its supply is sufficiently limited. A half-sovereign coin can be made to do the work (number of exchanges) as a one-sovereign coin if all one-sovereign coins were replaced by half-sovereign coins and no new coins were minted. [He means replacing each one-sovereign coin with a one-half-sovereign coin. He does not mean replacing each sovereign coin with two half- sovereign coins.] The same quantity of commodities would now be exchanged for the same number of coins. [This conclusion is highly unlikely. When exchanges were made under the gold standard, they were based on the gold content of the coin and not the number of coins. People compared the value of the product to the value of the gold content of the coin and not to the coin itself. Most likely, what would happen if half-sovereigns replaced all one-sovereigns, dealers who sold their products for one sovereign would now sell them for two half-sovereigns. Cutting the money supply in half as in McCulloch’s example would significantly hamper commerce and, by that, production.] He offers no example where what he suggests would happen has ever happened. McCulloch maintains that the value of inconvertible paper currency “depend[s] on the proportion which its amount bears to the commodities brought to market, or to the demand; and wherever a currency of this kind, or a limited gold currency, is in circulation, the common opinion that the price of commodities depends wholly on the proportion between them and the supply of money is quite correct” (pp. 319-320). However, “with a freely supplied currency consisting of gold and silver, . . . fluctuations in the supply and demand of such currency have no permanent influence over its value. This is determined by the cost of its production” (p. 320). [In
The Value of Money, Anderson argues that the cost of production determining gold’s value is incorrect. He asserts that the “value of money is a quality of money, that quality which money shares with other forms of wealth, which lies behind, and causally explains, the exchange relations into which money enters.” “Value {of money} is prior to
exchange. Value is not to be denned as ‘power in exchange.’” According to Anderson, the social value theory best explains the value of money: “the social value theory is the only way of giving a
psychological explanation to the demand-
curve, and a marginal value explanation of marginal demand-
price.” Thus, the value of money derives from the value of the commodity of which it is made and from its services as money. The value of the commodity as money is combined with the value of the commodity in its non-monetary use. Like all other commodities, and everything else, the value of the monetary metal and of its use as money is psychological. Anderson concludes, “The physical weight in gold, which itself is an object of social value, is commonly the immediate basis of the value of the dollar to-day, but money may get its primary value from other sources than valuable bullion. Given this primary value, the dollar may get an enhancement in that value from the services which it performs in the social technology of adjustment.”]
Poor retorts:
Mr. McCulloch might as well have assumed a particular county of England to be fenced off by a wall so high that only a small amount of vital air could get into it; and that, in such case, the right to breathe would sell at an enormous price; and have inferred, therefrom, that, should the amount of money be limited, its price would rise in like ratio. One illustration is as pertinent, or rather as impertinent, as the other (p. 320).
Poor continues, “Whoever gets gold, gets it to spend. There may be quarrels between those who dig and those who rule as to who shall enjoy the product; but, whatever the result, it would immediately go into circulation” (p. 320). [Today, the rulers have resolved the quarrel by driving gold from the monetary system. They have given themselves absolute control of the monetary system. Contrary to the claims of most orthodox fiat money proponents and probably all fiat money reformers, the Federal Reserve is not an independent agency independent of the government and does as it pleases. It is just the junior partner in the scam to pillage the American people. The government is the senior partner. It created the Federal Reserve; the Federal Reserve did not create the government. It exists at the pleasure of the government, which may abolish the Federal Reserve anytime. Working together, the government and the Federal Reserve can confuse the people by blaming the other for the country’s economic problems although both are guilty.]
Poor notes that in another work of McCulloch, McCulloch claims that controlling the movement of precious metals is impossible for governments (p. 320). Poor writes:
His illustrations, however, are in keeping with those of the school to which he belonged, which is always assuming impossible instances as a means of setting forth its conclusions and beliefs. It is the way of children, not the method of men of full stature. Neither the production nor possession of the precious metals can be monopolized. Their value everywhere, under all conditions (allowing for the influence of accidental circumstances), is measured by their cost (pp. 320-321).
[Governments may not be able to prevent the movement of gold, but they can greatly hamper its movement. For example, with few exceptions, the
U.S. government prohibited Americans owning gold between 1933 and 1974.]
Commenting on McCulloch’s belief that if the currency’s quantity is strictly limited, a debased currency can function as well as full-weight coin, Poor remarks that Locke had proven more than a century earlier, that a debased coin will not function as well as a full-weight coin. About the period of recoinage of English money in 1696 when Locke made his argument, Poor writes:
For a time, the amount of coin in circulation, or currency of all kinds, equaled hardly a tithe of that required for the exchanges of the country. These, for a considerable period, had to be made by means of credit or barter. Yet the necessity which then existed for a “circulating medium” did not exert the slightest influence in raising the value of the debased coins. The value of each was measured by the cost of the metal that each contained. Had their value risen greatly above their cost, supplies would immediately have flowed in from other countries. If tickets or counters were all that were wanted, these could easily have been provided, as McCulloch suggests, by cutting the pieces in circulation into a sufficient number of parts. It was capital, not counters, that was wanted, and relief came only when that was supplied (p. 320).
Poor continues:
But even admitting that, by reducing the amount of metal in coins, their value might be maintained from the necessity of their use, there was still an important link wanting to connect his premise with his conclusion. Gold gets into circulation by means of its value. It circulates at its value. If its amount were permanently decreased, its value would increase. This is palpable enough; but how is that which is valueless in itself to get into the category of values (p. 322)?
[This is the question that others also ask: How can that which has no value itself and is not the representation of value measure value?]
Poor asks how can something that has little or no value get into circulation in the first place? He answers that McCulloch would claim that some medium of exchange is needed and people agree that this worthless thing would be their medium of exchange. To this answer, Poor replies, “[I]t is useless to reply to such assumptions as these. They are the dreams or vagaries of persons bereft of all sense in reference to the subjects to which they relate, and who, unfortunately, are wholly impervious to reason” (p. 322).
Commenting on
bank notes, McCulloch writes:
Notes not legal tender, and payable on demand, or at some stipulated period, are not paper money, though they serve the same purposes during the time they continue to circulate. The value of such notes is wholly derived from the confidence placed in the ability of the issuers to retire them when presented for payment, or when they become due. Whenever, therefore, this confidence ceases, their circulation necessarily ceases also (p. 322).
About paper money, i.e., government notes, McCulloch states that “confidence in the solvency of the issuers exercises the smallest influence over the value of paper money” (p. 322). Paper money is legal tender and not legally convertible into gold or anything else. “It circulates because it is made legal tender, and because the use of a circulating medium is indispensable; and its value, supposing the demand to be constant, is, in all cases, precisely as the quantity in circulation” (p. 322). He believes that the issuer of inconvertible paper money can maintain par with gold or silver without difficulty (pp. 322-321). To maintain a constant price of gold, all that the issuer needs to do is to decrease or increase the quantity of paper money. [This is the recommendation of some supply-side economist in recent years.]
Poor questions McCulloch’s assumption that “an inconvertible government note of the nominal value of an ounce of gold, to be of equal value, and exchangeable therefor” (p. 323). Moreover, Poor comments that according to McCulloch, inconvertible government notes circulate “not from any value it possessed, but from the necessity for its use as a ticket or counter of exchange” (p. 324). Furthermore, according to McCulloch, such money need not be made legal tender (p. 324). Poor wonders how such money would ever get into circulation and who would accept it (p. 324). Also, how would the excess be retired? [The government can get its notes into circulation by printing them and paying them to its employees, welfare recipients, and suppliers. It can further encourage the circulation of its notes by requiring them in payment of taxes and making them legal tender at the debtor’s option for payment of debts. In theory, the excess could be removed by having tax receipts to exceed expenditures enough to retire the excess — when was the last time that happened?]
McCulloch proposes eliminating precious metal, either as bullion or coin, as money because of the excessive cost. Paper should be substituted for metal. Thus, paper would replace gold as the reserves held by banks (pp. 324-325). [In the United States between 1862 and 1879, U.S. government notes replaced gold largely as reserves for banks. Today, all bank reserves are in paper and its electronic equivalent, which is even cheaper than paper.]
If McCulloch’s proposals were implemented, Poor sarcastically remarks, “The monetary millennium would then dawn on the world” (p. 325). [If McCulloch had lived another hundred years, he could see the results of his monetary millennium. His monetary millennium arrived in 1971 when the world divorced itself completely from gold and substituted entirely a paper and electronic monetary system in its place.]
In response to McCulloch’s proposal, Poor writes:
But what does every one seek in exchanging that which he possesses? To better his condition; to get something which will be more valuable to him than that with which he parts; in order to have that which, when he wishes to use it, will bring to him the greatest possible amount of values in other forms. Gold and silver, therefore, are always demanded in exchange, for the reason that they are values in their highest forms. The whole effort of mankind is to convert its industries and products into such values, or into that which shall produce them; and which, till its possession be demanded, is drawing interest in kind for the benefit of the party entitled to it. The whole effort of nature is in the same direction, — to convert lesser into greater values (p. 325).
Then Poor remarks that McCulloch “would invert all this order, by converting whatever a person has to sell, not into the most valuable, but into the least valuable form” (p. 325).
In his concluding remarks on McCulloch, Poor writes, “Nothing can be more disgraceful in a man like him, — Professor of Political Economy in the university of a city which, commercially, is the very eye of the world, and standing at the very apex of his school, — than the ignorance and assurance he displayed” (p. 327).
Endnotes
1. B.M. Anderson,
The Value of Money (New York: The Macmillian Co., 1917), pp. 8-9).
2. Ibid., p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 42.
4. Ibid., p. 591.
Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.
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