The very notion of a ‘currency value’ should dissolve one of economics most fundamental unities, viz.: that money is both a store of value and a medium of exchange. Now if ‘value’ is routinely said to be a property that a currency possesses in varying degrees, then ‘value’ and the ‘medium of exchange’ cannot logically be the same thing. Nor should they be: economic science exists for the sake of measuring value; and the whole project is negated when value is uncritically accounted-for in some counting unit having limitless extensibility (e.g.: currency) while no other possibility for the measurement of value is allowed. ‘Variable unit of measure’ is a scientific contradiction in terms, and it will not be perpetrated upon these premises.

Money is an admittedly unique commodity: it is the liquid state of power; the ability to do work in a transmissible form; and, if you like, a medium of exchange. But, being as temporally variable in magnitude as any other commodity, money cannot serve as economics' invariant reference commodity. And, by extension, neither can anything that must be denominated in money.

Value, by contrast, is merely a unit of measure that we have the ability to construct and to exploit just as other sciences might set and use their units of physical measure. Value inheres in a set of financial state variables that underlie constant-value, or reference prices. These prices neither inflate nor deflate as a consequence of economic adjustment. Their absolute magnitudes only change to properly reflect changes in the model’s boundary conditions. They are used as a basis for indexing each currency relative to its value at the beginning of a simulation, as well as for cross-indexing the currencies relative to one another during the simulation.

SFEcon measures value in terms of a global currency unit GCU, or G, which we define as the 1997 US dollar. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics produced a full I/O table for this year; the US was the largest single economy at that time; and the US produces a full spectrum of commodities.) The number of GCU’s is calculated by summing the dollar-equivalent of global output during 1997, and this sum becomes a constant of theory expressed in a constant output rate Y₀₀ for the zeroth good in the zeroth (i.e. global) economy.

Having ordained a good 0 for our experimental purposes, we immediately incur the obligation of demonstrating its necessity to a pleasing theory. Unfortunately, the path to this theory is rather lengthy; and it will easiest to proceed if we begin by setting-out its ultimate goal. Completion of Model 0 requires calculation of cardinal prices P_JK for all commodities J in the respective (and variable) currencies of the economies K. These calculations are a product of 1) the money price P_0K of one GCU in the currency of economy K with 2) the absolute value Y_J GCU/unit of commodity J:

Thus cardinal prices are organized in a matrix indexed by commodity J and economy K:

The hypothetical price data above are logically arrayed such that commodity values Y_J occupy the zeroth row and general price levels P_0K occupy the zeroth column. This scheme expresses neoclassicism’s requirement that global stasis cannot occur until relative commodity prices are the same across all economies. In our Friedmanite best of all possible worlds, this condition becomes apparent in the relationship between Economy K’s prices P_JK and K’s general price level P_0K with respect to a set of global values Y_J.