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Concept
Chartalism
Summary
In macroeconomics, chartalism is a heterodox theory of money that argues that money originated historically with states' attempts to direct economic activity rather than as a spontaneous solution to the problems with barter or as a means with which to tokenize debt, and that fiat currency has value in exchange because of sovereign power to levy taxes on economic activity payable in the currency they issue.
George Friedrich Knapp, a German economist, invented the term "chartalism" in his State Theory of Money, which was published in German in 1905 and translated into English in 1924. The name derives from the Latin charta, in the sense of a token or ticket. Knapp argued that "money is a creature of law" rather than a commodity. Knapp contrasted his state theory of money with "metallism", as embodied at the time in the gold standard, where the value of a unit of currency depended on the quantity of precious metal it contained or could be exchanged for. He argued the state could create pure paper money and make it exchangeable by recognising it as legal tender, with the criterion for the money of a state being "that which is accepted at the public pay offices".
When Knapp was writing, the prevailing view of money was that it had evolved from systems of barter to become a medium of exchange because it represented a durable commodity which had some use value. However, as modern chartalist economists such as Randall Wray and Mathew Forstater have pointed out, chartalist insights into tax-driven paper money can be found in the earlier writings of many classical economists, for instance Adam Smith, who observed in The Wealth of Nations:
Forstater also finds support for the concept of tax-driven money, under certain institutional conditions, in the work of Jean-Baptiste Say, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and William Stanley Jevons.
Alfred Mitchell-Innes, writing in 1914, argued that money existed not as a medium of exchange but as a standard of deferred payment, with government money being debt the government could reclaim by taxation.
Official source
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