11th June 1574"What do you mean, it"s impossible?!"
Forced to realise that I didn"t really have any real court for myself, I was trying to slowly build it with the people I trusted the most, yet just the first meeting of what I hoped to remodel from a simple advisory council into a proper court instantly turned into a disaster.
"If we use paper to make those acts, what will stop anyone from making them by themselves? While minting the coin is against the law, if we could somehow use our production means to create something no one else would be capable of reproducing, it could work way better. The other way to go about it is to start from the bottom."
Hearing Matsu"s arguments, I couldn"t help but agree with them silently, yet the fact that my idea shattered the second it was put against the reality of the current times still made me quite angry and disappointed.
"What do you mean, from the bottom? If we find out a way to create something that is hard to counterfeit and use it to pay our workers instead of using the gold to do so… That might work!"
Suddenly changing my opinion in the middle of my own sentence, I was about to sink in my own thoughts like usual, yet the sudden slam of the table stopped me from doing so.
"Are you out of your mind? If we suddenly cut their income and turn it into some kind of new currency, they will simply stop working!"
Looking at the guy that spoke up, I only managed to hold myself back from scoffing at him due to the fact that he was one of the most effective managers in the entire mining town. Even if he failed to understand the concept behind this new currency and the ways that we could use to implement it, he was still one of my most valuable managers!
"It"s actually pretty simple. We won"t force this change, we will simply offer it to the workers. They will be able to choose whether they want to be paid with the usual gold or with… Hmm… merit papers? Yeah, I think that this name is fitting."
Figuring out the details of such important matter on the spot might not be the best idea, but when it came to naming stuff, it didn"t really hold that much meaning. No matter what kind of name we would use for this new currency, its worth would still remain the same!
"But what reasons would those workers have for ever picking to earn merits rather than gold? It"s not like they could use merits anywhere else than in our own shops that we don"t even have plans for yet!"
Hearing the words of the manager, I couldn"t help but start doubting his worth as a manager. Even if he was efficient with moving the manpower around, could he still maintain his current level of ability if he failed to see the obvious profits of our current situation? Or was he just posing those questions for the sake of everyone else in the room that was too worried about their position or simply too shy to ask away?
"Listen. So far, I continued investing in all sorts of projects, with close to no real returns from any of them, outside of the fact that every completed investment increased the speed at which the other was developed. But you must have seen that the city that we were building was quite different! Not only different in terms of not bringing us any potential profits, not only different in the fact that outside of swallowing a huge part of our manpower it didn"t contribute to our progress, but most importantly, different from all the other cities that you can see in the country!"
Waiting for a few moments to let the words that I just spoke sink in everyone"s mind, I looked around to confirm that they finally started thinking about it in the way I currently wanted them. Because in reality, outside of the fact that I knew that as the development of the mining area would grow a city would sooner or later appear there anyway, I never had any intentions of using it as leverage to introduce a new kind of money!
"Listen up. The houses and in fact, all the buildings that we are constructing in the foundation of the city, are way more advanced than any other housing available anywhere in the country. From the easy access to the water, both cold and warm one, through the internal sewerage that will save its future citizens from having their streets flood with faeces… Everything about this city is aimed to be an improvement. What if we just claim that the houses that will be built there could be bought with the merit papers alone?"
Once again letting everyone to digest this proposition, I waited for a moment before picking the lead once again.
"That can serve as a good start. As we will get more resources at hands, we can construct trading areas in there, supplied with all sorts of wares that will be brought to the grand marketplace that we are constructing right now. This will allow us to turn this concrete plaster that we have right now, into the most prosperous and well-supplied city in the entire country, not to speak about all kinds of shops that we could sell the wares that we will produce at relatively low prices!"
The more examples of possible benefits behind possessing those merits papers I gave, the more excited I was turning myself. In the economy, money is nothing else than a promise. We promise each other that we will consider this piece of worthless paper to have a certain, given value. But without the authority of the crown to back those claims or the stockpile of gold to give it any real meaning, we could go the dollar way!
Instead of using the gold or silver to guarantee the value of the paper money, we could simply use the immense production capabilities of the industrialised areas to back our claims for those papers to have any worth!
"I think this is a good idea… But you do realise that it will only take a few days before more intelligent merchants will start buying off those papers? If they will be given a chance to settle in a newly created city, one with such insane prospects for growth, all sorts of people are going to go at each other throats even for a hint of a chance to obtain a single merit paper of yours!"
While I was already excited by introducing the first type of trust-based money to this world that didn"t really need to have any real value behind it, hearing Matsu"s words made me realise something of an even greater potential that could turn into either the backbone of the commonwealth economy or its greatest disaster. Yet as it was nothing else than a tool that I had way more experience in dealing with than anyone else in this world, I would be stupid to not introduce it as well!
"That"s something simple to fix. We will introduce the rule that only our exchange houses are allowed to be the sole middleman in all trade aimed to exchange gold for those papers!"