Let’s say the government declares that 30 days from now, tooth-pastes will function as legal tender money. What will happen? Firstly, the prices of tooth-pastes will sky-rocket. Next, tooth-pastes will disappear from the shelves of supermarkets. People will be hoarding and stockpiling tooth-pastes. After 30 days, when tooth-paste becomes officially legal tender money, people will start to have bad breath, especially the poor, who can’t afford to consume tooth-pastes for the sake of oral hygiene. Then the demand for tooth pastes will rise to the moon, not because the demand for oral hygiene increases, but because the demand for tooth-pastes as money increases. Not only that, no matter how much tooth-pastes Colgate produces, there will always be shortages because there will be mass-hoarding of them as money.

This may be a funny though-experiment. But if oil should ever function as medium of exchange, the outcome will not be funny.