Burying money: hoarding as a danger to the common weal

Hoarding, as Marx argued in Critique of Political Economy and Kapital, was a ‘completely senseless activity’. Quoting an impressive range of political economy writings from the ancient Greeks to Martin Luther and mercantilists such as Misselden, Genovesi's Lezioni di Economia Civile (1765) or Petty's Political Arithmetic, Marx characterised the hoarder as:

a martyr to exchange-value, a holy ascetic seated at the top of a metal column. He cares for wealth only in its social form, and accordingly he hides it away from society. He wants commodities in a form in which they can always circulate and he therefore withdraws them from circulation. He adores exchange-value and he consequently refrains from exchange. The liquid form of wealth and its petrification, the elixir of life and the philosophers’ stone are wildly mixed together like an alchemist's apparitions. His imaginary boundless thirst for enjoyment causes him to renounce all enjoyment.

Marx was not the first economic writer to abhor hoarders. He had certainly read his Luther – one of the most ardent critics of hoarding – as borne out by the extensive quote from Luther's Sermon on Commerce and Usury (1524), buried in the footnotes of Critique of Political Economy. Luther in turn had drawn upon Scripture, as would other contemporary Renaissance humanists who likewise habitually ridiculed and condemned hoarders and their dangerous habits. Classical writers like Xenophon had critiqued practices of hoarding, too; defining them as harmful they for business and economic life. As late as 1850 a popular book on Lives and Anecdotes of Misers; or, The Passion of Avarice Displayed rehashed centuries-old tropes of hoarding's vices, parsimony and the ‘ill-natured miser’, a ubiquitous figure in 17th- and 18th-century cameralist political economy. Dutch emigre and London- based mediconomist Bernard de Mandeville, in his 1714 Fable of the Bees (defending the idea of private vices as the driving forces of capitalism), mentioned the problem of money locked away in the ground where it was of no use to economy and market exchange.