Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

PRIMORDIAL DEBTS 59
For instance, Ingham notes that, while there is no actual proof that
money emerged in this way, "there is considerable indirect etymological
evidence":
In all Indo-European languages, words for "debt" are synonymous
with those for "sin" or "guilt", illustrating the links between
religion, payment and the mediation of the sacred and
profane realms by "money." For example, there is a connection
between money (German Geld), indemnity or sacrifice (Old
English Geild), tax (Gothic Gild) and, of course, guilt.40
Or, to take another curious connection: Why were cattle so often
used as money The German historian Bernard Laum long ago pointed
out that in Homer, when people measure the value of a ship or suit of
armor, they always measure it in oxen-even though when they actually
exchange things, they never pay for anything in oxen. It is hard to
escape the conclusion that this was because an ox was what one offered
the gods in sacrifice. Hence they represented absolute value. From
Sumer to Classical Greece, silver and gold were dedicated as offerings
in temples. Everywhere, money seems to have emerged from the thing
most appropriate for giving to the gods.41
If the king has simply taken over guardianship of that primordial
debt we all owe to society for having created us, this provides a very
neat explanation for why the government feels it has the right to make
us pay taxes. Taxes are just a measure of our debt to the society that
made us. But this doesn't really explain how this kind of absolute lifedebt
can be converted into money, which is by definition a means of
measuring and comparing the value of different things. This is just as
much a problem for credit theorists as for neoclassical economists, even
if the problem for them is somewhat differently framed. If you start
from the barter theory of money, you have to resolve the problem of
how and why you would come to select one commodity to measure just
how much you want each of the other ones. If you start from a credit
theory, you are left with the problem I described in the first chapter:
how to turn a moral obligation into a specific sum of money, how the
mere sense of owing someone else a favor can eventually turn into a
system of accounting in which one is able to calculate exactly how
many sheep or fish or chunks of silver it would take to repay the debt.
Or in this case, how do we go from that absolute debt we owe to God
to the very specific debts we owe our cousins, or the bartender
The answer provided by primordial-debt theorists is, again, ingenious.
If taxes represent our absolute debt to the society that created