Thomas Paine's dream world

Are we actually talking about an "ideal world" here, or just an "ideal USA"? If the former's supposed to be the case then Sweden would probably already have gone for paper money around the date when it do so OTL anyway: With no significant gold or silver deposits in the country, and few reliably-in-demand exports in those days to bring in enough foreign currency instead, they'd had to resort to copper 'plate money' whose higher-denomination "coins" were slabs that weighed tens of pounds... I've seen some examples in the British Museum, and the largest ones were actually made with holes near the corners at one end so that the owners could pass lengths of rope through them and wear a pair of those "coins" as one might a pair of sandwich-boards!
 
OK, I'll tone it down to just America.
America was what Tom Paine was concerned about anyway.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
America was what Tom Paine was concerned about anyway.

No, it wasn't. Tom Paine was an early internationalist who saw beyond national boundaries. Had it been otherwise, he would have stayed in America after the Revolutionary War, rather than travel back to Europe to work for democracy in Britain and France.
 
OK, I'll tone it down to just America.
America was what Tom Paine was concerned about anyway.

And that sentiment was what led to the day Paine sat in a condemned cell waiting for the guillotine when word arrived that Robespierre had fallen.
 
Yes. Even if any government was stupid enough to make it illegal, the paper money of some other government would just be used instead.

Agreed, paper money is just too useful to be successfully banned. Despite what some on the far right think the world went off the gold standard for good reasons.
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
Agreed, paper money is just too useful to be successfully banned. Despite what some on the far right think the world went off the gold standard for good reasons.

This is kind of a...non sequitor?

Actual gold, coin or bullion, usually made up something like 5-15% of the money supply under the classical gold standard in the United States. The majority of money was in bank notes or deposits, with a variety of more exotic financial instruments making up the rest.
 
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