Hal Varian is a very, very smart economist, now Professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, and chief economist at Google. For a number of years, he used to write a monthly column for the New York Times. In a January 2004 column, he posed the question “Why Is that Dollar in Your Wallet Worth Anything?.” The first answer he considered was the one in which most lay people probably believe: that the government makes it worth something by declaring it legal tender. The problem with that answer, Varian observed, is that whatever the government says, nothing prevents people who want to from using something other than dollars to execute the transactions or discharge their debts. If people didn’t find it in their own best interest to transact in dollars, all the legal tender laws in the world couldn’t force them to keep making transactions in dollars.
Varian therefore proposed…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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