Locke's Theory of Money: An Overview

Instead of providing a detailed reconstruction of Locke's entire theory of property in the state of nature, I will focus on the position of money in the larger problématique which John Yolton called “Locke's dilemma,”Footnote ⁷ namely, “how MenFootnote ⁸ might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to mankind in common, and that without any express Compact of all the Commoners” (II. 25).Footnote ⁹ Locke's way out of this dilemma is to posit labor as an exclusive property in each person, the expenditure of which on the natural common removes a portion of it from the common state and inscribes that person's private property in it (II. 27, 35). However, God, who bestows upon man the earth and the means to appropriate it, also places limits on appropriation (II. 31). The natural law is breached when appropriation overrides, on the one hand, the “sufficiency limitation” which dictates that “enough and as good” should be left in common for the others (II. 27, 33), and, on the other, the “spoilage limitation,” which prohibits one from engrossing more than one can mix his labor with and make use of before it perishes (II. 31, 36, 38).Footnote ¹⁰ This double circumscription restricts the amount of private property in the state of nature “to a very moderate Proportion” (II. 36). The invention of money and men's mutual consent to put a value on it instigate a drastic transformation of this egalitarian state of affairs by enabling one to “fairly posses more land than he himself could use the product of, by receiving, in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to anyone” (II. 50), since “the exceeding of the bounds of just Property” lies not “in the largeness of his Possession, but the perishing of anything uselessly in it” (II. 46). By giving men with different degrees of industry the opportunity to continue to enlarge their property, money eventually introduces scarcity of land (II. 45) and “a disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth,” yet without encroaching on anyone's natural rights, for the universal consent conferred on the value of money amounts to the universal consent to the inequality that it engenders (II. 50).

C. B. Macpherson perceives in this chapter a clear “assertion and justification of a natural and individual right to property,” in which the role of money consists in “remov[ing] the limitations inherent in his initial justification of individual appropriation.”Footnote ¹¹ For Macpherson, Locke's deployment of the notion of money is a strategic one, which, while leaving the moral foundations of individual property intact, cleverly opens up the possibility of utilizing “money and land as capital,” introduces alienable wage-labor, and paves the way for unlimited capitalist appropriation.Footnote ¹² Perhaps most ingeniously, Locke locates the consent to money, along with its ramifications, in the state of nature and thereby establishes property and contract prior to civil society and hence as a realm independent of politics.Footnote ¹³ Despite the critical broadsides Macpherson's interpretation has received, the main axis of his analysis has continued to inform a number of scholars who adhere, albeit more cautiously and critically, to the premise that Locke's notion of money serves the cause of setting capitalist relations of production on solid theoretical grounds. Locke's intentions have been described as furthering the idea of “natural social laws which operated automatically and independently of man-made institutions”Footnote ¹⁴ and a “natural market society” beyond the purview of political power, which foreshadowed the “invisible hand” models of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵ A closely related argument has been that his conception of money and property is definitively capitalisticFootnote ¹⁶ and promotes “hoarding” as a way of accumulation for investment.Footnote ¹⁷ By sanctioning surplus production, Locke's notion of money justifies the dismantling of subsistence economies and the dispossession of the English peasants and the American natives, promotes capitalist relations of production on land,Footnote ¹⁸ and expresses the capitalist thrust for accumulation on a world scale.Footnote ¹⁹ The success of the strategic introduction of money hinges on circumventing the natural law while leaving it intact, and while some hold that Locke accomplishes this maneuver,Footnote ²⁰ others see in it the destruction of “the moral purpose associated with God's gift of the earth”Footnote ²¹ and “blatant violations of natural law.”Footnote ²²

Macpherson's explication of Locke's theory has been criticized, on the one hand, for overlooking the latter's fundamental theological underpinnings and downplaying their moral and communitarian implications, and, on the other, for anachronistically reading full-blown capitalism back into a body of work that was informed by biblical exegesis and the great natural law tradition.Footnote ²³ Such criticisms emanate from an alternative strand of interpretation, most clearly articulated by James Tully and Richard Ashcraft, which focuses on the framework of religion / natural law / morality. In this framework, the preservation of mankind, the principle of common good, and the moral injunction to labor on the earth as God's gift override any natural right to private property and unconditional accumulation. For Ashcraft, the invention of money and its consequences figure as historical contingencies within this framework, which neither directly issue from nor violate the purposes of the natural law.Footnote ²⁴ While admitting that money is pre- or apolitical, he refuses to conclude that it is “natural.” Rather, money belongs to the domain of “probable knowledge” and constitutes not a “moral constant” but a “prudential variable,” and all property accruing from its use is accordingly conventional.Footnote ²⁵ Although money enables men to acquire more “conveniences” through exchange without breaching the moral limitations on property, it introduces inequality and gives rise to the famous “inconveniences of the state of nature” (quarrel and contention), which then drives men to enter civil society for the protection of natural rights. The conclusions that Tully draws from Locke's theory of money are more radical as he recasts the introduction of money as the moment of the “fall” of man from the “golden age.”Footnote ²⁶ The motive behind the accumulation of money is neither the prospect of capitalist investment nor its utility for exchange, but the miser's penchant for simple hoarding.Footnote ²⁷ By inculcating in men the unnatural and corrupt “desire to have more than one needs,” money renders dysfunctional the natural law of appropriation, which it is the commonwealth's task to restitute by redistributing property and bringing it back in line with God's original command of the preservation of mankind.Footnote ²⁸

This emphasis on the theological-moral aspect of Locke's theory of property has some plausibility, and Laslett is right to remark that Locke's reliance on biblical exegesis in developing a theory of property cannot be accounted for as “half-conscious traditionalism or plain hypocrisy.”Footnote ²⁹ On the other hand, the depiction of Locke as a Christian communitarian with no stake in the emergent capitalist relations of production is equally untenable. For as Neal Wood notes, Locke was someone who “invested in the slave trade … charged interest on loans to close friends and was always tight-fisted, recommended a most inhumane—even for his times—reform of the poor laws, and bequeathed only a minute proportion of a total cash legacy of over £ 12,000 to charity.”Footnote ³⁰ The question that challenges the theological approach could be put thus: if money is a historically contingent phenomenon with a merely conventional basis (that is, outside the natural law), why can the inconveniences it engenders (quarrel and contention) not be resolved by a simple reversion to the premonetary state, instead of necessitating the formation of commonwealths? The question could be answered from the socioeconomic perspective by stating that Locke is simply trying to justify property accumulation; however, such an economic reduction of the problem assumes that the moral foundations of property are ultimately discardable for Locke. This would be blatantly at odds with the main objective of chapter 5, which is to demonstrate that the moral foundation of private property remains intact even at the stage where it is unequally held. The task at hand then becomes to construct an interpretation that addresses and avoids the pitfalls of both approaches. A possible way of accomplishing this task, I propose, is to recast money as an ambivalent conceptual ground that allows Locke to establish a necessary relationship between the precepts of the natural law and the process of capital accumulation. This theoretical move necessitates situating money in the broader framework of a teleological imagination of progress, which, as I demonstrate below, informs Locke's theory of property.

Teleology of the Natural Law and the “Dilemma of the Rational and Industrious”

A theoretical constant based on “the architectonic importance of theology” in Locke's thought is the idea of the purposefulness of creation.Footnote ³¹ As Ashcraft puts it, for Locke, “God has not only put us here; He intends us to do something.”Footnote ³² Men are created innately equipped with the capacity for reason that is necessary for apprehending God's purpose (telos), which manifests itself in the form of the obligations under the natural law.Footnote ³³ The first and most important moral obligation is the preservation of mankind, which Locke constantly reiterates in the Two Treatises of Government:

God has intended men to “Increase and Multiply” (I. 41) and given them the means for realizing this intention, though not without effort. The telos of self-preservation is coupled with the obligation to labor on the earth in order to provide for human needs. Locke asserts in the chapter on property, “God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded man also to labour, and the penury of his condition required it of him” (II. 32).Footnote ³⁵ “He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to be his title to it)” (II. 34). “God commanded, and his Wants forced him to labour” (II. 35). Labor's status as divine injunction renders it a fundamentally moral act. As Waldron remarks, “Laboring is not just something we happen to do to resources … it is the appropriate mode of helping oneself to the resources given what resources are for.”Footnote ³⁶ It is this embeddedness in the framework of the natural law that underpins Locke's theory of property, whereby “mixing one's labor” entitles the laborer to private property not only on practical but also on moral terms.Footnote ³⁷

Labor in the service of the preservation of mankind is further qualified by a third moral obligation, which directs it to the subjection and improvement of the earth. Initially contenting himself with property rights in the provisions “produced by the spontaneous hand of nature” (II. 26), Locke later proclaims the “chief matter of Property” to be the earth itself and contends, “God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of Life. As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his property” (II. 32). As with the previous obligations, the improvement of land is not a mere technical expediency but the appropriate method for supporting livelihood. God has intended the uncultivated land lying in nature to be brought under the improving labor of man. “God gave the World to Men in Common; but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest Conveniences of Life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated” (II. 34). At this juncture in chapter 5, the terms of discussion change noticeably and the binary of “value” and “waste,” through which Locke articulates the telos of improvement, takes the foreground. Although all useful things owe the greater part of their value to labor, none does so more than land, which is “of so little value, without labor” (II. 36). If not enclosed and improved by man, God's gift lies as “neglected, and consequently waste Land” (ibid.). In other words, enclosing and improving the waste of the earth is not only a more efficient way of producing the conveniences of life, it is also a moral duty because by rescuing land from waste, it more fully consummates the purpose for which God has bestowed the earth on men.Footnote ³⁸ This is in contrast to hunting and gathering in the first stages of the state of nature, exemplified for Locke by the American natives, which not only renders men “needy and wretched” for the want of labor and improvement (II. 37), but also falls short of following God's purpose by letting waste the resources that could be made use of.

At this point one begins to discern a progressive imaginary. As men rescue more land from waste by enclosing and cultivating it, as they labor and produce more necessities and conveniences for the benefit of life, in other words, as they transform greater parts of the world into valuable things, they better fulfill the obligations of the natural law, and more fully consummate God's purpose.Footnote ³⁹ The crucial term Locke devises to substantiate this progressive imaginary is “common stock of mankind”:

The increase in the common stock is not restricted to leaving more land available for others to enclose and improve, but extends to the products of the earth, as the example of Spain testifies: “the Inhabitants think themselves beholden to him, who, by his Industry on neglected, and consequently waste Land, has increased the stock of Corn, which they wanted” (II. 36, emphasis added).Footnote ⁴⁰ The example of America is most suggestive:

The notion of the common stock of mankind constitutes the privileged nexus in Locke's theory of property, around which the obligations to preserve, to labor, and to improve are interwoven and set in moral, teleological motion. God has furnished the earth with material intended for not only the necessities but also the conveniences of life, which allow men to augment their livelihood beyond bare subsistence (as attested by the English day laborer's much-celebrated prosperity compared to the Indian king's penury [II. 41]). And since the conveniences are proportional to the common stock of mankind, the enlargement of the latter must be thought of as a part of God's design and hence as teleological in structure.Footnote ⁴¹ The more mankind expands its common stock through the improvement of land by labor for the preservation of mankind, the more it approximates to fulfilling God's purpose.

The increase in the common stock, however, does not readily assume the form of accumulation. The theological precept that the fruits of the earth are intended for the use of mankind (spoilage limitation) restricts the extent of the common stock to what can be actually utilized by human beings before it perishes. The point is obvious in the case of the individual producer for whom it is “a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of” (II. 46). One solution Locke proposes to spoliation limitation is gift or barter:

The crucial point to note here is that while gift or barter overcomes the spoilage limitation for the individual producer, the same limitation remains in effect for mankind as a whole.Footnote ⁴² Even the most durable of goods, such as nuts, are ultimately intended for concrete use and not for accumulation. That is to say, while saving the common stock from waste, barter circumscribes it with the concrete needs of mankind at a given moment. Subsistence or “hand-to-mouth existence,” regardless of how much it is enriched by the conveniences, remains the paradigm of production and consumption.

At this juncture, Locke's interpretation of the natural law, if one may allow the expression, reaches its limits from within and reveals an internal impasse. The industrious and rational, to whom God gave the earth, heed their calling and ardently enclose, improve, and increase the common stock only to find themselves to be producing more than can actually be used, and thereby violating God's proscription of spoilage. Since the “terrors of natural law no longer strike the covetous, but the waster,”Footnote ⁴³ the industrious and rational face “an ethical dilemma.”Footnote ⁴⁴ They can avoid spoilage by limiting their labor to what can be used by themselves and others. This would entail enclosing and improving less than they could if the spoilage limitation did not exist, and hence leaving most of God's gift wasting in common, which is clearly at odds with his intentions, for “it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated” (II. 34). Alternatively, they can enclose, improve and rescue as much land from waste as their capacity to labor permits. This ultimately culminates in overproduction and the subsequent wasting of the fruits of labor, which is equally against God's purpose, for “if either the grass on his enclosure rotted on the ground, or the fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of the Earth, notwithstanding his enclosure, was still to be looked on as waste” (II. 38). Put differently, the dilemma is between letting waste and making waste, or the loss of potential value and actual value.

The contradiction in question is a grim one, for it implies a contradiction within the natural law. To acknowledge it as such would amount to imputing an inconsistency to the providential design, thereby throwing into question the moral fundament on which Locke erects his theory of property. Consequently, there must be something that could show that this apparent inconsistency is not an inconsistency at all, and that it is possible to unleash the full force of industry and labor in the service of God's purpose. There must be a way to labor and bring the entire waste of the earth under cultivation without violating the spoilage limitation, which means that there must be a way to store the value created by labor without letting it decay and return to the waste of the common. In other words, there must be a way to accumulate if the dilemma of the industrious and rational is to be dispelled. Given this necessary relationship between consummating God's purpose and accumulating value, in turn, there must be a medium in which value can be disentangled from the transience of the perishable goods and accumulated in abstract form for the satisfaction of anonymous future needs. In short, there must be money.

Money: Deus Ex Machina

Even though Locke cannot directly derive the possibility of accumulation from the original precepts of the natural law, his construction of his theory of property culminates in the necessity of accumulation for the consummation of God's purpose. I argue that the introduction of money, as the medium of accumulation par excellence, should be understood as Locke's attempt to navigate this paradox. However, since Locke cannot deduce the existence of money from the natural law, he assigns it a conventional position, which renders money an indeterminate phenomenon that is historical and consensual in its origin yet theological and teleological in its import. In what follows, I elaborate this point by explicating, on the one hand, the work money does in Locke's theory of property, and on the other, the peculiarity of the consent from which it is born.

The primary function of money is the fulfillment of the spoilage limitation in a way that allows for accumulation.Footnote ⁴⁵ Unlike the concrete products of labor, money would “keep without wasting or decay” (II. 37) and “may be hoarded up without injury to any one” (II. 50). One “might heap up as much of these durable things as he pleased; the exceeding of his just Property not lying in the largeness of his Possessions, but the perishing of any thing uselessly in it” (II. 46). However, contrary to what Tully argues, the motive behind the accumulation of money is not “miser's reason,”Footnote ⁴⁶ but the possibility of converting the stored abstract value back into use-value: “And thus came in the use of Money, some lasting thing man might keep without spoiling, and that by mutual consent Men would take in exchange for the truly useful, but perishable Supports of Life” (II. 47). While remaining within the paradigm of production-for-use, money introduces an element of temporal freedom by making it possible to postpone the moment of use indefinitely, at least in principle. In so doing, it liberates men from the requirement of immediately using the products of labor (“hand-to-mouth existence”) and enables them to rationally orient their productive activities towards some perceived future good.Footnote ⁴⁷

The new element of temporal freedom harbors momentous implications for the binary of waste and value, and it is not coincidental that this binary makes its appearance in the very section (II. 36) where money is mentioned for the first time. Money resolves the dilemma between “letting waste” and “making waste” by suspending the latter, and frees men to focus their energies on enclosing and cultivating not in accordance with their concrete immediate needs, but based on the extent of their capacity to labor. Consequently, insofar as the subjection of the earth through labor is among God's intentions for the world (II. 34–35), money proves indispensable for the consummation of the theological telos. Given this theological significance, it is hard to conceive of money as a mere practical expediency. This point finds support from several central passages in chapter 5, which suggest that the invention of money ushers a whole new way of imagining mankind's relationship to the world:

Note that in this passage, enclosure and improvement of land as grounds of entitlement are annexed to the logic of money, which is at once the condition and the substantiation of the drive to exhaust the earth through its transformation into value. Wherever money is used, the land ceases to be waste in principle, without regards to the actual state of land, as attested by the fact that Locke does not use the term “waste” to denote the land “left in common by compact” in England (II. 35). With this move, Locke equates the presence or absence of a progressive attitude that strives to put an end to the waste of the world with the presence or absence of monetarization:

These passages also shed light on the true significance of the term “waste” repeatedly and emphatically used by Locke throughout II. 36–50. For an objective empiricist, such as Locke is taken to be, there can be nothing “waste” in nature as such, but the latter is apprehended as wasting only when looked upon with a progressive and acquisitive gaze that perceives the world as a reservoir of potential value to be extracted and accumulated.Footnote ⁴⁸ Whether a plot of land is “worth inclosing” is predicated on whether it is possible to accumulate the value that is derived from it, which, in turn, hinges on the use of money.Footnote ⁴⁹ As a result, money becomes the nexus around which the religious teleology of subduing the earth and the practices geared towards the accumulation of value coalesce.Footnote ⁵⁰ From this perspective, the enlargement of possessions and the subsequent scarcity in land under a monetary economy is not to be lamented but rather celebrated as the sign of a closer approximation to God's purpose. Such scarcity entails dispossession and inequality in land, true, but it ameliorates this inequality by a boost in the production of value that feeds into the common stock of mankind, which renders a day laborer in England better fed, lodged, and clad than a king of a large and fruitful territory in America (II. 41).Footnote ⁵¹ Hence money not only leaves intact the moral obligation to preserve all mankind, it fulfills it better than the more egalitarian yet more penurious premonetary system, barter and gift notwithstanding.Footnote ⁵² And to bring matters full circle, since the expansion of the common stock of mankind is meant by God, money, as the precondition of this expansion, evinces a kernel of theological import.

The Paradox of “Natural Consent”

A major objection can be raised to the line of argumentation presented above by pointing out that for Locke, money is strictly consensual and anything that is consensual is squarely outside the domain of the natural law. Indeed, “consent” and “agreement” constantly reappear in Locke's discussion of money in chapter 5: “the invention of money and the tacit agreement of men to put a value on it, introduced (by consent) larger possessions, and a right to them” (II. 36); “had agreed that a little piece of yellow metal … should be worth a great piece of flesh, or a whole heap of corn” (II. 37); “in the consent of the use of their common money” (II.45); “things that fancy or agreement hath put the value on” (II. 46); “money … that by mutual consent men would take in exchange for the truly useful, but perishable supports of life” (II. 47); “riches … have but a fantastical imaginary value” (II. 184). The penultimate section of chapter 5 is where Locke brings the articulation of land, labor, money, and property to a close, and hence is worth citing in its entirety:

The conclusion Ashcraft and Tully derive from these passages is that Locke is trying to demonstrate that property based on money is conventional and cannot be justified on the grounds of natural rights.Footnote ⁵³ For Macpherson and others, however, locating the consent to money outside the bounds of society amounts to nothing short of the “naturalization” of money along with the property based on it by excluding their foundations from the domain of political human agency.Footnote ⁵⁴ Put differently, the former interpretation focuses on the presence of consent and concludes with money-as-convention, whereas the latter emphasizes the absence of compact and arrives at money-as-nature. Once again, the question is reduced to the choice between nature and convention, and Locke is forced to choose sides.

I maintain, against this binary, that Locke's theory of property, insofar as it posits a relationship of necessity between theological universals and accumulative practices, cannot choose sides regarding the nature of money. For the indeterminacy of the consent without compact that underpins money is the very strength of his theory, in that it allows Locke to depart from theological injunctions (preserve mankind, labor, and subdue the earth) and arrive at the moral necessity of accumulative practices (increasing the common stock of mankind).Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet in the process, the explicitly consensual language around money saves Locke the trouble of holding the difficult position that God directly commanded men to accumulate capital even if this meant widespread dispossession and inequality of wealth. In this respect, money remains a peculiar beast with historical and contingent origins yet theological and moral impact. It cannot be derived from the natural law without committing absurdity; neither can it be reduced to sheer convention without impeding the actualization of God's purpose. Hence the mode of existence that money inhabits is paradoxical and can be best expressed by the oxymoronic term “natural consent.”

The understanding of Locke's notion of money as a paradoxical “natural consent” or an area of indeterminacy finds some support from a close reading of some passages in the Second Treatise. The most striking characteristic of the consent given to the use and value of money is its universality. Going back to section 50, “men” who “have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth” are clearly not a particular group of men but all mankind, the protagonist of the Second Treatise. Similarly, “the earth” denotes not a particular geography but the entire world (Locke otherwise specifies America, England, Spain, etc.).Footnote ⁵⁶ This assumption of the universality of the consent to money does not budge in the face of factual contradiction. The absence of a monetary economy in America, rather than opening money's universality to question, renders the ancestral lands of Native Americans “natural common” until they “join the rest of mankind, in the consent of the Use of their common Money” (II. 45).Footnote ⁵⁷ This arrogation could be theoretically explained if and only if one presupposes the universality of money as a principle of necessity that binds the entirety of mankind.Footnote ⁵⁸ If one group of people has not joined in the consent to money, it is they, and not money nor “mankind,” who are at fault. Moreover, money is not only a phenomenon that rests on universal consent, it is the only phenomenon that does so. True, there are other instances of mutual consent in the state of nature, such as marriage, master-servant relations, and exchange of goods, but these are particularistic contracts that only obligate the parties involved, whereas the consent to money binds all mankind.Footnote ⁵⁹

As a point of comparison, the only phenomenon whose foundations evince an affinity with those of money is inheritance of property. In section 88 of the First Treatise Locke asks the question “how come Children by this right of possessing, before any other, the properties of their Parents upon their Decease” and discourses:

In the light of the logic presented in this passage, the position of money appears peculiar. On the one hand, the tacit consent underpinning the use of money would clearly position the latter in the domain of positive law, yet this contradicts Locke's contention that America is natural commons because the Indians have not joined the common consent to money. On the other hand, the universality of this consent and its binding validity for mankind would lead one to conclude that “where the practice is universal, it is reasonable to think the cause is natural”; nevertheless, Locke is incontrovertibly clear about the consensual origins of money. To summarize this point, if the use of money is natural because universal, and hence binds mankind, then it cannot be based on consent; if, in contrast, it is consensual and conventional, then it cannot be natural and hence lacks the power to bind mankind. This leaves money in an ambiguous, indeterminate position located on the border between positive and natural law.Footnote ⁶⁰

The paradoxical position of money can be further illustrated through a hypothetical scenario: mankind's agreement (express or tacit) to cease using money. Let us suppose that mankind was discontented with the inequalities and “inconveniences” engendered by the use of money in the state of nature, and decided, by universal consent, to cast it into desuetude. As a consequence, ceteris paribus, the evaporation of the medium of accumulation would entail a massive decline in the common stock of mankind, precipitous fall in trade, disappearance of the main motive for enclosure and improvement, shrinkage of possessions because of the spoilage limitation, and the return to the common waste of all that has been hitherto accumulated beyond hand-to-mouth existence. This would not only drastically reduce the aggregate conveniences of life (the English laborer would now be fed, lodged, and clad more or less like an Indian king), but it would also violate the moral obligations under the natural law by allowing the value produced by labor to perish uselessly and by wasting the already subdued and improved land. In short, the withdrawal of the tacit consent from the use of money amounts to a profound moral effrontery, and for this reason it cannot, or rather must not, be withdrawn. Hence, whereas all conventional relations established by mutual consent among men, including marriage, exchange, or even government, can be undone by another act of mutual consent, the same freedom cannot be permitted in the case of money. In other words, if it is an act of consent that founds money, then it is the only consent that cannot be retracted without violating the natural law. As a result, the inconveniences introduced to the state of nature by money have to be regulated by the government founded on a further act of consent.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet the power of revolution vested in “the people” in the case of civil government lacks a counterpart in the case of money, which is ultimately the cause of the institution of government. Regicide is permitted; disaccumulation is not. Governments come and go; progress rolls onward.