I was hoping to go straight to Part Two of my essay on capitalism. It will be about the actors of capitalism. An alert reader, Jim N, stopped me dead in my tracks by questioning what I said about the gold standard. I had only mentioned this topic in connection with the single main constraint on capitalism today, the fact that government agencies get to decide how much money flows into the economy. So, here we go, here is a digression on money made necessary by an attentive reader. He uses the word “currency” in his comment. I will use the more familiar word “money” because I think it means exactly the same thing for our superficial purposes

Money is anything that can be used to store value. Suppose you bring a chicken to the local market to sell it. In a non-money economy, if there…