In the interstices of an involved discussion concerning the collapse of the West, which had ramified into the topic of finance,

...and people make the mistake of thinking money is a thing. Especially a thing they can save up and spend in the future. But it’s not a thing, it’s a measurement. You can’t really save dollars any more than you can save inches or degrees Celsius.

To which I responded:

[The Poster] makes a very important point here. The idea of money is not to be confused with the value-token itself. And in the last analysis money is nothing more than an idea, a purely extensional something-or-other which is spread over the field of wealth in order to denominate values. That is why it can be manipulated by purely intellectual means. Real wealth can be earned, taken, grown, or inherited, but it cannot simply be notionalized into existence—unlike money. Everyone who now laments the inflationary destruction of our currency (and I count myself among them) will have reason to complain about its merely notional value, as though it were of no more account than blank pieces of paper circulating around. But wait…maybe there’s something to that idea which we have not fully considered.

In order for the idea of money to be fully self-consistent, the highest and purest form of money should be entirely notional. The value-token ought to have no independent value of its own: it ought to be nothing but blank pieces of paper circulating around—or if possible something even less substantial than that. The Keynesians weren’t stupid after all. Wrong, yes, but not stupid. They grasped the essentially Gnostic character of money better than anyone else. There was not to be, in their view, any unnatural liaisons between matter and form, no Hypostatic Union of pure, spiritual money with base, material gold. When the value-token itself has value, money can never really come into its own as an independent, liberated force. Exchange in specie is still just barter, even if it is barter in a common coin. Furthermore, the Keynesian had thought they’d seen the writing on the wall with the Great Depression. When value-tokens are valuable in themselves, then in times of economic uncertainty people will hoard them, thus withdrawing them from circulation and bringing about a deflationary collapse. Their answer to this was sublimely simple: flood the economy with notional money in order to grease the skids of commerce. The plan had the “beneficial” (from their point of view) side effect of destroying the value of savings (hoardings), liquidating the wealth that was represented therein and pumping it into circulation. Of course, in order for it all to work properly, draconian measures had to be taken to prevent people from trading in anything other than the fiat currency, otherwise the inflation just would have increased the value of the previous value-tokens along with everything else, and there would have been no net transformation of the economy. Against the osmotic gradient of Gresham’s Law, bad money must be made not to drive good money into hoards, but to flush it out of its hiding places and gobble it. This explains FDR’s prohibition on the private ownership of gold.

But it was above all the finance-men themselves who embraced the concept of liberated money. It was, according to them, not things which had value, but our relations to things, our “positions,” the latter being an abstraction only and hence a suitable object for the operations of notional money. So began the furious process of arbitraging which we today know of as finance. Before the Keynesian Revolution the finance sector was only the servant of the market; now it wrestled the market to the ground and made itself master. The era we are living in—the era which is now coming to a close—has been colored predominantly by the liberation of money as an independent force, a force knowing neither quantitative limitation nor qualitative distinction, but sweeping up all before it in a conflagration of sophisticated plunder.

And how shall it all end? We must bear in mind that we can only go forward to the future, not back to the past. It will not be possible to simply reinstitute a gold standard—not yet. Our entire political economy and way of life is not compatible with specie. The money-men have spread a system of interlocked financial tensions over the entire globe. They have brought the situation to such an intense focus that it is now scintillating with portentous groanings. The resolution will require a different kind of man to appear on the scene: somebody who will amass huge fortunes, not because he delights in making money, but because he wants to rule. Then he will bring the financial powers to their knees, and he will say to them, “You tried to put the value of your own will in place of the value of gold, but you forgot that my will, the will to power itself, is weightier than yours.” After intellect destroyed culture, and money destroyed intellect, money is itself overthrown and abolished by blood. The coming of the Caesar-man snaps the tensions and reacquaints the world with the primordial facts of existence. It is only there and then that the etiolated life of decadent ages finds its level again.

I also find it strange that your tone is ambiguous.  In other words, you don't say whether you approve or disapprove of this "Caesar-man."  Thereby leaving yourself an out in case someone raises questions, as I'm doing here.

Enough already with your attempts at depth analysis, Raoul. You've proven time and time again that you do not know what you're talking about when it comes to assessing my motives for posting this, that, or the other thing. I've let this slide up until now, but by accusing me of ambiguity you've finally forced me to put a stop to it.

I completely approve of Caesarism. Not only have I never made any secret of this, but I have argued for it so vociferously in other internet fora that my name is now associated with Constantinism wherever I post. I am a political disciple of Dante Alighieri, who believed in the Empire and who considered Julius Caesar to be doing the Lord's work. The Apostle Paul was of the same opinion. What I was describing in my response was an admittedly compressed version of the sequence of events by which Julius Caesar actually came to power in ancient Rome, and which by analogy a new Western Caesar will come to power in our time. When extentional money rules the scene, one has to amass money first before one can become powerful. The difference between a Caesar and a finance-man is that the Caesar has his sights set on on ruling and simply uses money as a means to an end, while the finance-man's chief delight is to be wealthy. The Caesar has a higher and nobler type of will; by his very existence he brings an end to the reign of money-powers and reestablishes facts and truths as the criterion of success. This is good for reason, good for the development of the possible intellect, good for the world, and good for the Church. I don't see what at all is disturbing about it.

I am not talking about the Great Monarch at all, nor will I ever talk about the Great Monarch, because I find that whole concept to be irrelevant. The very idea of a Great Monarch is a matter of private revelation, binding on absolutely nobody; and even if the prophecy turns out to be true, nobody will know exactly what it meant until it is all over. I'm talking about ordinary, everyday historical morphology. Republican Rome (us) is always succeeded by Imperial Rome, and the Western world right now is on the cusp of that transition. It is helpful to understand the larger civilizational patterns swirling around us so that we may better adapt ourselves to the exigencies of the times, and raising such awareness has always been a primary focus of my writting.

Man of the West you are pretty much 'on the money'  

Catholic teaching on this is firmly in favor of hierarchy in human organizations, and also monarchy, since family is the unit of society (and not so much the individual). Money is a human invention and as you say should be no more than a tool of statecraft and a mechanism for fairness and economy in material dealings. What form money should take and how it should be dealt with is likewise up to Man to invent for himself, but I would be interested in your thoughts as just what form money should take (if you were Caesar).

The gold-bugs, the 'sound money' libertarians are just as mistaken as those who currently run the 'fiat money' fiasco we are living through. Both are equally corruptible, but of course fiat money is the Jєωs' favorite because they so love hyperboly and exaggeration... the derivative market is just like a Jєωιѕн brain when it comes to concocting deceptions: make it up, then just to be sure make it up a thousand-fold to make it appear impossible to undo (without a big crash).

I also think we cannot go back to a gold standard, and that if we do it will be short lived as it would quickly result in many wars because of its geopolitics, just as it did for centuries before. There are too many people in the world for gold to work, in my opinion.