*Note - This was originally published at
’s Liberty Magazine, which I’ll be publishing certain works at in the future. I’m republishing it here in full. The ideas will come into play with the next post in the current Polis series.
Today, good Readers, we’re going to delve into Economic Nominalism. That is, Nominalism applied to the realm of economics. It is an error the runs rampant through out society, destroying everything it touches.
And it touches everything.
As such, we’ll start with what Nominalism is first, and then go into what Economic Nominalism looks like.
Nominalism
Nominalism - in philosophy, position taken in the dispute over universals—words that can be applied to individual things having something in common—that flourished especially in late medieval times. Nominalism denied the real being of universals on the ground that the use of a general word (e.g., “humanity”) does not imply the existence of a general thing named by it. The nominalist position did not necessarily deny, however, that there must be some similarity between the particular things to which the general word is applied. Thoroughgoing nominalists would withhold this concession, as Roscelin, a medieval nominalist, is said to have done. But unless such similarity is granted, the application of general words to particulars is made to appear entirely arbitrary. Such stricter forms of nominalism as existed in the Middle Ages can perhaps be viewed as reactions against Platonic realism, on which some enthusiasts, such as Guillaume de Champeaux, based the opinion that universals had real being. The realist position invited a defensive alliance between empiricism and nominalism; the most notable medieval example of such a synthesis was the work of William of Ockham.
So. Nominalism is the idea that there are no universals. There are only particulars. There is no such thing as Race - just that person who happened to commit a crime! No such thing as pedophilia, just someone who happened to sodomize a young child! No such thing as men and women, just people that identify with those particular words! No such thing as humanity, just people that identify with it, or not and think they’re cats!
I think you see where I’m going.
It is obviously a rampant error within our society. And it has been for a while - since the Middle Ages, it has gained steam since the French Revolution. This is both in the average man’s thinking, as well as in the sciences. If you believe is no ‘truth,’ but only ‘things that can be proven untrue’ on a philosophical level - then you’re a nominalist. You are implicitly denying universals exist, even if you don’t acknowledge doing so.
While yes, the scientific method is a useful tool, one must acknowledge it is merely a tool, and not a philosophy to use to determine one’s metaphysics or relationship with the Truth. However, few scientists, let alone average citizens, seem to understand this philosophical distinction. Most find themselves drifting ever left, towards nominalism, and find themselves surprised when the general populace barks like a dog.
You can apply this to any field of knowledge. And, to our great chagrin, many do.
Enter Economics
Now, a tendency to deny universals, applied to economics… What would that look like?
Very few are crazy enough to deny the reality of the physical thing, or labor, being done in front of them. So we’ll dismiss those people as not mattering, not worth our time.
However, when it comes to numbers, such things are ripe for nominalism to start tinkering with. Specifically, the value of the goods being bought or sold. A nominalist, denying universals, will deny that there is any universal measurement of value upon with labor or capital can find for any set of goods. It’s all relative, subjective value, all the way down.
Thus, if the Free Market decides the value, that may be the value.
Or, if the individuals buying and selling decide the value, that may be the value.
Or, if the most recent house/stock/whatever sold for something recently, that may be the value.
Or, if Uncle Sam declares eminent domain, that may be the value.
But, under no circumstances to the economic nominalist, is there a universal, real value to things. There is only the sale price.
Fiat Pricing vs Value
Of course, this price is also determined in Fiat, which varies in value according to the nominalistic terms. There’s no universal value to the money either, so it goes up and down, daily, as does the bargaining for one’s prices on goods and services.
Yet, the values of those goods and services stay the same.
The value of a cow to breed or eat stays the same. So does the values of the foods in the store to eat.
The value of a home to live in, with running water, electricity, and heat/ac - stays the same.
The value of having a working car to get me to and from the places I need to go stays the same.
The value of the labor people prove stays the same, if not getting better as their skillset does.
These are examples of universal values. Should the remain the same - so does their value. They have baseline, universal values that are applicable to all men, everywhere.
Their prices, there fore, have a baseline from which to communicate.
Also, these prices, being a universal value, should set something from which a large deviation would raise eyebrows as being unjust.
A cow that is being sold, but cannot be bred as it is infertile, has less inherit value than one that can be both eaten and bred.
The value of food that poisons your body with GMO’s, high fructose corn syrup, and seed oils, goes down in comparison with those without such additives.
A house that is in need of major repairs has less inherit value than one that is move in ready.
A piece of property with no top soil, being completely rock and bolder, is of less value than one in Kansas with three feet of top soil.
The value of someone’s labor if they’re less productive or skilled, while still demanding a living wage, is less than that of a specialized technician able to keep chemical plants operating when no one else can.
Do some people have subjective needs, such as an emergency, rendering something more necessary to obtain or sell? Absolutely! Yet, the Just man should not seek a discount/premium in buying or selling unless it is offered in such cases, as such is extortion of the individual’s situation. This is condemned in both natural and supernatural law. There is a reason such people are considered heinous, no matter what economists will tell you.
Universal values are there fore a starting place from which to start discussions, being an undeniably real thing, to seek Just exchanges and contracts between individuals. And, contrary to any objections, there is no system that man can contrive that works without virtuous people. One simply must have them for any system of exchange to work. Without them corruption, greed, extortion, blackmail, and other immoral acts will take place, regardless of the systems put in place. Thus, any objection to a value system based on seeking Justice based on lack of virtue is flawed, because it is the lack of Justice that is collapsing our current system anyways! One must fix the people, and the system, at the same time for any headway to be made at all.
The Is/Ought Objection
Adam Smith, at this point, would make the objection that what I’m describing is how people behave, and not how they think. That, somewhere in the world, there are people teaching that it is immoral to buy low, and sell high.
Tell me dear reader, honestly, have you ever heard, ever in your life, that it is immoral to buy low, and sell high? That, having done no labor or anything to add value to what you are selling, you are either making illicit gains, stole the labor of another, or were gambling - all of which have moral implications?
I would contend that most people have no moral objections, no moral sermonizing, and listen many podcasts and lessons on how to do exactly that - buy low and sell high. IE - to ignore universal values for the material gain of dollars and wealth. Thus, they adhere to both the ought and the is.
If one considers oneself a failure for having not sold high, at or near the top of a market, gotten all you could out of the car you sold, the house, etc; you’re an economic nominalist because you have the ought within you.
If one considers oneself a failure for not having bought low, missed a sale, or found a ‘better deal’ than the average market price for something; you’re an economic nominalist because you have the ought within you.
The Sound of Good Money
Let’s review from some of my other posts what the Medieval scholars thought was the essence of money:
A unit of exchange that,
Could be counted and,
Was preferably resistant to laws of entropy
The third was optional. While gold bugs like to say that gold has been used for thousands of years - so has credit. From Babylon to the Tally stick. So have cows, sheep, and pigs - even for settling crimes and fines in places such as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Anthropologists have seen everything from sea shells to rocks used as money, verifying the Medieval claim that these societies work as long as people agree to such terms.
However, Gold, having little use value, much trade value, and resistant to the laws of entropy (not perfect, just resistant) does make the best money we know.
However….
For the Economic Nominalists in the room…
How does one value the GOLD!?!?!?
For in modernity, we value it in dollar terms, in Yen, in Renminbi, in the Euro…
All changing in value, no universals to be found. Because they’re all fiat.
I have posited that the true value of a money, what it represents, is labor value. That is, the value of all goods is determined by the amount of labor hours, and the value of those individual hours based on their skillset, that went into the components.
Thus - the price of gold is roughly set by the labor hours of the people to take the ore out of the ground, refine it, and get it to you. Plus all the labor hours involved in making the machines and fuel that went into the process.
While this might sound complicated to compute here (and it would be!) should labor hours actually determine pricing of components it would simply all be priced in. And, then if gold was valued on labor hours going into mining it, gold would be settled via labor to extract.
One does not get around this by doing a Gold to Oil, as I have seen some economists do. For you run into the same dilemma, how do you price the Oil? If you price one in the other, how does that work for different grades of crudes? How do different gold mines match the price if they have different costs? No, all it does is extend/hide the fiat behind the oil.
Gold and Labor VS Gold and Fiat
And then we’d have a Gold/labor backed economy, instead of a Gold/fiat one that Gold bugs imagine, where Gold is just magically set at an arbitrary price, with lots of zeros after it.
We tried gold and fiat - it has wrecked every country that has attempted it. When you arbitrarily set a price on gold, people horde it, or smuggle it out, or smuggle it in. They impoverish the nation, and the peoples within it.
Having a Gold price set by labor though, encourages re-industrialization. It encourages labor to re-engage with the market, to see their efforts be rewarded - because they’re the backbone of the economy. It is not some fat cat on wall street, with horded gold and manipulated gold futures, gold stocks, and gold everything - seeking to get fake, fiat wealth and grind down the blue collar.
Instead, everything is set on blue collar prices, and everything is affordable to blue collar workers. Because it is their work that determines the prices.
Not some economic nominalist seeking to get rich by denying things have value when prices are low, and selling them when they’re high.
Such economic pirates, that are driving our youth and our elderly to live on the streets, should consider the fate of the pirates of the Middle Ages - when Nominalism was invented.
Pirates were Hung.
Wouldn’t this make corporations into super mega corporations, so they could have the most laborers, and thus be the most valuable companies?
Unless you dissolved the stock market, this is exactly what would happen.
Saving this for later like dessert