This article makes the same mistakes that the OP's article does - assumes the truth of the myth of barter. It even uses the odd term 'time-offset barter', which I have never seen outside of libertarian/ancap analyses. Barter is a spot transfer, 'time offset barter' isn't barter but something else.
samatman|6 years ago
jmcmichael|6 years ago
Barter requires a coincidence of interests. Alice grows some pecans and wants some apples; Bob grows apples and want some pecans. They just happen to have their orchards near each other, and Alice just happens to trust Bob enough to wait between pecan harvest time and apple harvest time. Assuming all these conditions are met, barter works pretty well. But if Alice was growing oranges, even if Bob wanted oranges as well as pecans, they'd be out of luck -- oranges and apples don 't both grow well in the same climate. If Alice and Bob didn't trust each other, and couldn't find a third party to be a middleman [L94] or enforce a contract, they'd also be out of luck.
This is the canonical Myth of Barter, where some society is assumed to have existed that was so inconvenienced by the double coincidence of interests/wants/needs that it invented money. This never happened as there exists no evidence that a society existed that used barter as its main method of exchange; barter was used on the edges of society, spot transfers made between people who did not have the trust necessary to support debts.
Here's the passage where he refers to 'time-lagged barter':
Local but extremely valuable trade was, this essay argues, made possible among many cultures by the advent of collectibles, by the time of the Upper Paleolithic. Collectibles substituted for otherwise necessary but non-existent trusting long term relationships. If there had existed a high degree of sustained interaction and trust between tribes, or individuals of different tribes, so that they gave each other unsecured credit, this would have stimulated time-lagged barter trade.
I did read the article. In fact, I read this article years ago shortly after it was published as back then I was an anarcho-capitalist, very interested in non-state solutions to money.