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Chartalism is the theory that money originated 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. ==Background== Georg Friedrich Knapp, a German economist, coined 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. At the time of writing the Gold Standard was in existence, and Knapp contrasted his state theory of money with the view of "metallism", 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".〔 Constantina Katsari has argued that principles from both metallism and chartalism were reflected in the monetary system introduced by Augustus, which was used in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, from the early 1st century to the late 3rd century AD.〔 〕〔 〕 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. Modern chartalist economists such as Randall Wray and Mathew Forstater argue that more general statements appearing to support a chartalist view of tax-driven paper money appear in the earlier writings of many classical economists.〔 Adam Smith, for example, 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, J.S. 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. Innes argued: Knapp and "Chartalism" were referenced by John Maynard Keynes in the opening pages of his 1930 ''Treatise on Money'' 〔Keynes, John Maynard: ''A Treatise on Money'', 1930, pp. 4, 6〕 and appear to have influenced Keynesian ideas on the role of the state in the economy. By 1947, when Abba Lerner wrote his article "Money as a Creature of the State", economists had largely abandoned the idea that the value of money was closely linked to gold.〔 Lerner argued that responsibility for avoiding inflation and depressions lay with the state because of its ability to create or tax away money. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Chartalism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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