In a modern economy, farmers, miners, artisans and
professionals do not barter their products or services anymore. Barter is how
trade used to be conducted from ancient times up to the mercantile era.
What happens now is that a central bank prints what is
called fiat money, and has it distributed to each according to merit. Such
money, whether actually printed as a banknote or transferred electronically, is
called currency. And it is what people use to buy what they need, or against
which they trade what they have in surplus.
Something similar happens in the marketplace of ideas where
a great deal is generated and pushed out as being legitimate currency, if not
the only legitimate currency. And so, to understand what is going on in the
marketplace of ideas, we need to go back to the transitional period that
separated the mercantile era from the modern one.
It was during this period that metalworkers, called smiths,
were enjoying their heyday. At the top of the food chain were the smiths that
handled the precious metals, most notably gold and silver. Hence, you have the
nouns as well as the proper names Goldsmith and Silversmith. Some of these
workers expanded their business into pawning which quickly turned into banking.
This prompted them to use IOU notes (now called banknotes,) that the clients
held to prove they have a deposit at the bank.
A growing confusion ensued when the number of banks that
issued banknotes proliferated, each having a different value, and each
presenting a different level of risk for, some of the smiths went under because
of anyone of many reasons. And this is what prompted the government to
intervene by creating the central bank, giving it sole authority to print what
is called legal tender. Anything else that pretends to be such tender is called
bogus currency, and dealt with according to the law.
What happens in the marketplace of ideas at this time
resembles very much what used to happen during the transitional period
separating the mercantile era from the modern one. It is that you now have
individuals and groups telling the world their ideas are genuine currency
whereas the opponents can only offer bogus currency.
An example that will show how this works is the article
written by Victor Davis Hanson under the title: “Our Make-It-Up World” and the
subtitle: “Facts now pale in comparison with the higher truths of
progressivism.” It was published on October 30, 2014 in National Review Online.
He begins with a question that makes up his first paragraph: “Do bothersome
facts matter anymore?” And he starts the next paragraph with the answer: “Not
really.” He thus establishes at the outset that he complains about non-facts
(or lies) being peddled as facts.
This done, he lists a number of non-factual lies which, he
says, were presented as truths. Let's look at the first one: “Americans were
assured that … Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and
lowered the deficit.” But the truth is that only a projection was made to this
effect before the fact, not a false presentation after the fact. Whether or not
the projection panned out when the time came is another matter. The fact
remains that the projection was an opinion presented as such, whereas the
Hanson handling of it is a deliberate deception. This makes of Victor Hanson,
and all those like him fabricators of bogus currency with which they flood the
marketplace of ideas to discredit others and get credit for their own quackery.
You may go through his entire list, and you'll find that he
falsely accuses others of describing as factual what they only presented as
personal impressions, possible uncertainties, unsolved contradictions, acts of
political gamesmanship and so on and so forth.
But if you strip away from the marketplace of ideas all
opinions, impressions, uncertainties, contradictions and games, you'll be left
with no market. They may be defective products but they are not bogus currency.
In fact, a currency being a single note representing something bigger than itself
sitting in a bank vault, its analogy would be the single word or the short
sentence that refers to something big written in a book of law.
For example, to designate someone as a terrorist, refuse to
negotiate with kidnappers, forbid future Congresses from dealing with UN
agencies that recognize Palestine as a state – are words or sentences that
refer to bogus laws passed in the middle of the night with no more quorum to
back them than me writing a million dollar IOU note with not an ounce of gold
to back it in my non-existent vault.