Thanks for the link Jonathan. Hopefully as this message spreads, we will find more money men calling for serious change...

Thanks for the link Jonathan. Hopefully as this message spreads, we will find more money men calling for serious change...

The Cobden Centre are great. I discovered them last week and have added them to my RSS reader.

Would that it Were all so simple!

Yes indeed a Cobden link would be a worthy addition in the Right margin of this site

Perhaps paradoxically, traders have only the narrowest sense of what money is and how it works. They'll inevitably come up with some sort of formulation based on the notion that money orginally evolved as a barter facilitator... which is touchingly sweet, even a theoretical "Austrian" context. Unfortunately the real world, especially the real world as we're invited to envisage it "throughout most of history," is just slightly more complicated than that. Those who genuinely wish to push back government need (I'd suggest) to engage more consistently with non-theoretical aspects of money. And actually, if history is your thing, the Dutch-Spanish tango of the 16th and 17th centuries is not a half decent place to start.

As recently as the early 19th century most coins in the American West (including the Pacific West such as California) were privately minted - the private mints accepted gold or silver to be minted into coins, accepted a small percentage of the gold or silver as payment and there you go.

And people accepted the coins because they were not debased - mints that debase lost their reputation and went bankrupt. People choose to value the gold and silver - they could (and sometimes did) trade with such things as animal skins.

"How did it end?" - Congress bought up the biggest mints and banned the rest.

For people who want a closer to home example - Birmingham (England) had private mints.

And in the Kingdom of Hannover gold and silver coins were NOT rigged in their exchange rate for many years - their value was allowed to fluctuate freely as people choose (yes choose) to value the gold and silver.

"Oh you libertarians - you just measure things by the thought experiments of Carl Menger, why do you not give real historical examples?"

Well I just have.

Alsadair, you are conflating the concept of paper money (any sort of script: depository receipts, negotiable instruments, etc., or their bastard cousin fiat currency) with the use of precious commodities (generally gold or silver) as a medium of exchange. Two are not the same, and the rise of gold (or seashells, or whatever) to facilitate barter is more than a "touchingly sweet" fantasy. That such a useful market-devised tool should be corrupted and, ultimately, thoroughly bebased by governments is unfortunate but hardly surprising; everything government touches turns to excrement.

Ah, to feel our pain, that we felt first.

I do love that sense of rebellion among professionals.
Sometimes things get bad enough that they're really
good.

Laird writes:

...; everything government touches turns to excrement.

With due allowance for hyperbole, there is a modicum of truth in that.

However, the statement lacks utility: some government is unavoidable; condemning it all is therefore not useful.

A tighter contribution would be better.

Best regards

Go read Karl Denninger. Fractional reserve banking is not fraud as long as money is loaned against assets of value. The present crisis was partly due to banks making unsecured loans or loans against over valued assets.

Yes, this one's doing the rounds - it's excellent.