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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;NorthKorea, post: 1762285, member: 29643&quot;]Political opinions aside, the advent of insurance companies made it more viable to become a doctor by profession. Prior to that, you would need to do work on the idea of being paid in installments. If you didn&#039;t get paid, too bad for you. With insurance companies, at least doctors would have a baseline of income for their practices.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Also, credit cards are NOT legal tender. Individuals and companies can refuse to accept credit card based payments. That is the entire idea of something being legal tender. As for the jeweler scenario, how does the placement of interest change things? That was already in place at the time, so debt was (and still is) debt.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>To say that fiat currency had nothing to do with growth of technology is foolhardy, at best. Without fiat, the billions of dollars spent in development would have to represented by millions of ounces of gold. You may argue that it would be paper backed by gold, but the reality is that commerce would still be restricted by the amount of physical gold above the ground.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The size of the global economy is somewhere in the range of $70-$100 Trillion. 5.6 billion troy ounces have been mined in the history of mankind. If we were still on the gold standard, we would need ~15-20 times the current amount of gold to accomplish the same amount of productivity. That assumes that all of the gold mined was held in global treasuries. We know that isn&#039;t the case, so the number would be significantly higher.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>There&#039;s no way that we could have seen productivity grow at the same rate on the gold standard. Giving governments the power to control the money supply is essential for a technology driven economy. I won&#039;t argue this anymore, as your responses to this point have ignored history, technology and context. I feel like I&#039;m arguing with a freshman political science student.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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