Random Thought About Money in the Gulch
Okay maybe I'm overthinking this, but I was watching Part III of Shrugged and in it Galt told Dagny that in the Gulch they only deal in gold. But how do they make small purchases? Galt gives her a few coins and in the next scene she's buying a croissant from a vendor in that market. So let's say the muffin cost $2. At $1500 per ounce, $2 worth of gold would weigh .0013 ounces, or 0.37g. The density of gold is 19.32 g/cm^3, or .019cm^3 of gold.
Now, a penny (just needed a sample coin) measures about 1cm in diameter with a height of, say 1mm? That would give the penny a volume of .907 cm^3. So if you had a penny-sized gold piece, you could by 48 muffins with it! How do they make change? Put another way, a penny made out of pure gold would have a value of $92.02... That's a lot of muffins!
So either there's some MAJOR deflation in the Gulch, or I hope the Mulligan Mint puts out silver and copper coins as well!
Now, a penny (just needed a sample coin) measures about 1cm in diameter with a height of, say 1mm? That would give the penny a volume of .907 cm^3. So if you had a penny-sized gold piece, you could by 48 muffins with it! How do they make change? Put another way, a penny made out of pure gold would have a value of $92.02... That's a lot of muffins!
So either there's some MAJOR deflation in the Gulch, or I hope the Mulligan Mint puts out silver and copper coins as well!
"A mint?" she asked. "What's Mulligan doing with a mint?" Galt reached
into his pocket and dropped two small coins into the palm of her hand. They
were miniature disks of shining gold, smaller than pennies, the kind that had
not been in circulation since the days of Nat Taggart; they bore the head of
the Statue of Liberty on one side, the words "United States of America—One
Dollar" on the other, but the dates stamped upon them were of the past two
years.
"That's the money we use here," he said. "It's minted by Midas Mulligan."
"But . . . on whose authority?"
"That's stated on the coin—on both sides of it."
"What do you use for small change?"
"Mulligan mints that, too, in silver. We don't accept any other currency
in this valley. We accept nothing but objective values." '
What is your time worth in the Gulch?
Also gold is valuable in the real world because of its scarcity. Unless the Gulch has many tuns of unmined gold ore, it will be just as scarce, and scarce currency, whether paper or metal, is always going to be worth more. So one would have to assume that even if $1500/ounce isn't the right conversion to use, it would still be in dollars, it has to come from the outside world at some point, and would still have a high worth because of its scarcity.
No one gets gold in the Gulch unless he earns it in the Gulch. So the value is whatever the Gulch free market barter system says it is, although if Midas is a banker he has some control over supply until it is mined in the Gulch. It's worth what you can buy with it even if its being used as a raw material, too.
As for the question of what my time is worth in the Gulch, I'm not sure I can answer that. My most marketable skills are in computer technology, mathematics, statistics, and electronic databases. If we're using the 2016-year-0 timeline then I imagine some of these skills would be valuable relatively speaking, but impossible to put a $GG value on it (I just made that up), but I'm also thinking that if the only money worth anything is money from the Gulch, it can't POSSIBLY have any dollar value at all. It would be the only currency in the world for which there is no exchange rate. Because as soon as you say "this coin is worth $100" you're assigning a fiat value to it, right? Then again, there's nothing wrong with exchange rates per se. The dollar itself is not evil, just the fact that it's not backed with anything. As long as everything's backed with gold I don't see the problem.
Seemed like a very expensive muffin (it actually looked like a croissant...but the point remains.)
https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...