Here lately I've been feeling like I suspect most people have been -- suspicious of the dollar bills that sit in my wallet. They certainly aren't my friends anymore, so the feeling must be mutual. Every time I open my wallet my friends are deserting me.

This morning, one of the Internet search titles in the so-called news highlights caught my attention, it was titled Your dollars are just Monopoly Money. The author, Bill Fleckenstein had some good points.

It's time we all took a remedial course in money

Before the invention of money, thousands of years ago, people exchanged things directly with each other. A man gave a cow for a horse. He gave a pottery jar that his wife had made for some eggs or a string of fish. As we all know, this method of exchange, or trade, is called barter. Bartering still goes on around the world.

Let us try to imagine what life would be like if we used the barter system of trade in place of money. Suppose you were in the business of handcrafting quality furniture and you hoped to exchange some furniture for a car, a new business suit, and many other things.

You would be immediately at once confronted by several problems. To begin with, the automobile dealer may not want the style of furniture you make. Likewise, the clothier, may not have a need for furniture.

You can be certain that the cost of the car is equal to many pieces of furniture, maybe more than you could make in several years. Then, that same car dealer might only want one piece of furniture, but that's not going to get you your car.

Your furniture is more valuable than that business suit you covet and need and you don't need or want too many suits in the same style as the clothier offers.  So again you have some issues to work out.

In the past in a community where every family produced most all the things that it needed to live and get along, a barter system of exchange might have been satisfactory. For example, little, if any money was needed in the early days of civilization, when most people lived on the land. Every family provided practically all its own needs for food, shelter and clothing, so there was not much trade of any sort.

However, as towns and cities sprang up, the economic life of the people changed. Individuals and families began to specialize in occupations. One family, for instance, would devote itself to raising grain, another to raising cattle, another to grinding the grain of the neighboring farms and converting it into flour, another into making shoes, and so on.

In this manner arose the several perplexing problems of exchange which led to the invention of money. Thorough its use we all can (or used to) readily exchange our work, or the products of our work, for the labor or products of others. For a glorious (or not so glorious time, depending upon your lot in life) many thought how wonderful was the invention of money and how far-reaching its influence on the everyday life of the world!

The beginning of money was simple. People in certain areas agreed with each other to recognize some particular articles as a general standard of value.

Many different things came to be issued a money from time to time.

A man's wealth came to be reckoned, as we find recorded in the Old Testament, by the size of his flocks and herds. So, among the earliest standards of value we find cattle. Cattle were actually used as money.

Grain, however, was a much better form of money because it could easily be divided into small quantities. A live animal could not be so easily converted.

Many other things came to be used as money in the early days, as for example, bars of iron. Only a few hundred years ago shells were used for money and later, furs, by the American Indians. The Virginia colonists used tobacco. However, let us go back to an earlier day, when the world was young.

As civilization advanced and metals came into use, they became more and more used as money. This was especially true of the rare metals, like gold and silver. They were not only rare, but were universally desired for their beauty.

Everyone was willing to accept them in exchange for any other goods they had. Moreover, these metals were not only rare, but almost indestructible, and easily divided into pieces of any size, so that a little piece might be exchanged for a loaf of bread or a pound of meat. A large piece could be given for a horse, a suit of clothes, or a still larger piece could even get you a house.

The value of money is something I've had a lot of time to contemplate in my lifetime. I was once married to a very rich man who whenever he thought I was paying too much for something, had a nifty little saying that in married speak meant "I won't be happy if you buy that at that price."

It still annoys me to admit that he was right about anything, but he was right. Since money acts as a standard of value, when we change our goods for money we are in the business of "selling money." So here is my ex's little saying:

"You are not buying something, you are selling money."

This buying and selling through the use of money enables us to speak of things as being with so much money. Thus money conveniently measures value by a common standard. Or at least, that's supposed to be how it works. This measure of value by money it what we call "price." The price of an article is its value expressed in money.

Money also serves as a "storer of value." Upon receiving payment to cover the sale of items, we might not spend all of it right away. A portion of that money will probably be put in the bank until we have a use for it. Thus in that manner money also serves as a storer of value. However, here again, that's how it is supposed to work, not necessarily true of how it works today.

Very early, gold came to be adopted by nearly all civilized countries as a standard for money. It is not only rare, but stable in value. It is almost indestructible, and loses none of its value by being divided into small coins.

It is everywhere desirable and confidently accepted. A small piece is of high value,, so a considerable amount of money in gold can easily be carried. It is not too heavy or bulky to carry around -- not like cattle, for instance.

The other coins we use-- silver, nickel, bronze, and copper -- are merely tokens and are coined for convenience ins mall transactions. We could not use gold quarters or gold cents because they would be absurdly small. Even when five dollar gold pieces were issued they looked very much light bright new pennies and were sometimes mistaken for them.

Paper money is included as part of the monetary system in all civilized countries. As long as a country keeps gold, or the ability to buy gold, as backing for the paper money which it issues, the paper money is as good as gold, because the holder is able at any time to change it into gold in theory.

However, let us suppose that the paper money of a country cannot be excahnged for gold, since the country does not have enough gold. Even then, if the amount of paper money issued is not too large, that is, if only enough is printed to serve the country's needs, prices will not change much from day to day.

Sometimes we learn almost nothing from history and history repeats itself.

When countries are faced with terribly high expenses of carrying on war campaigns and dealing with difficulties they often have in the past resorted to printing very large quantities of paper money, so that the countries were flooded with paper money that is not backed by gold.

We've seen that during both World War I and World War II. Governments kept printing more money, instead of putting the national finances in order. However, as more and more paper money was issued, its value fell rapidly and people had less and less confidence in it.

As each fresh batch was printed, the prices of goods rose, which really meant that the money was worthless. That is what we call inflation.

When there is inflation, people lose faith in the country's money. As we've seen, there cannot be confidence in money unless it is generally recognized as a standard of value and accepted as a medium of exchange.

There is where history repeats itself here in the United States. In 1933, our government stopped giving gold for notes. This was technically referred to as "going off the gold standard." We did it again in 1971 during the Nixon administration.

Now, here we are doing it all over again at a speed warp pace that we can't possibly recover from.

It comes down to good and bad paper money. Good paper money, can be exchanged for gold. It's protected paper money and referred to as a "managed currency."

Bad paper money, similar to the German mark or the Russian ruble in 1924, is called "nonconvertible notes" because gold cannot be obtained for them and because their value consists merely of what they will buy in the market, their buying power falling as the number of such notes increases.

There was a time in Russia that they issued so much paper money that a printed note was so worthless that a blank piece of paper was worth more than the paper money.

When a nation has good money, and when, as a consequence, there is perfect confidence in the national money -- we are able to do most of our business without using money at all. This used to be the privilege enjoyed in the United States -- that's rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Bad money in a country is an evil, not only for the nation which issues it, but for the world as a whole. It's a global world that is interdependent upon each other and the financial soundness of our country is creating a global financial crisis.

What happens when or if the U.S. dollar becomes an "nonconvertible note" --- that's the question we all should be asking ourselves.