Has any society benefitted from paper money?
When you factor in inflation and counterfeiting, how has any society materially benefitted from paper money, issued by a government monopoly central bank? Keep in mind that the whole world used metallic coins until the 20th century.
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Coins can be counterfeited as well (and they were when they had value) and are more expensive to manufacture by the government.
Today, it would be much easier to counterfeit a coin, than it would be a paper bill. Nobody does it, because hardly any coins have any real value. You cannot remove counterfeiting all together.
Edit:
Also when paper money was put into circulation, it was close to impossible for the normal man to counterfeit it. However, at the time, many people could easily counterfeit coins.
The whole word has less poverty, longer life expectancy and a better standard of living now that they did when the gold standard was abandoned. Life was pretty dismal for most people before the 20th century. It is a common misconception that the gold standard prevents inflation, it is just that periods of inflation were balanced by period of deflation so the net is zero.
Until the 20th century, the whole world did not have electricity, cars or internet.
I’d say those are an acceptable tradeoffs for inflation.
Actually, paper money was in use in China 1000 years ago. England has had paper money since the late 1600′s, and I believe one of the Scandinavian countries had it before that.
Coins can (and have been) counterfeited probably since the first coins were produced.
A lot of people look at the era when we had "real money" backed by gold and silver, and point to the low rate of inflation as proof of how good things were. They overlook the fact that about every 20 years, this country had a depression. Not a recession, like the most recent one. A 1929 style depression. In other words, if you’re under 80 years old, the economy was worse than you’ve seen in your entire life. And that happened every 20 years or so. Of course there was no inflation, as soon as the economy started to get going, it had to collapse, due to the inelasticity of the money supply. Do a wikipedia search on the phrase "Panic of", and you’ll be able to see all the business crashes that happened, just in the US.
Honestly, I think we’re miles better off than we would have been without a central bank. It does mean that the people who manage the money supply have to be careful, but it’s been a lot more stable that it would have been otherwise.