Monkeypox is a disease that I have been monitoring for quite a while now.  It is not supposed to spread easily from human to human, and hopefully that is still true.  But human cases are now popping up in the UK, and authorities are not exactly sure how it is spreading.  As we have seen […]
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It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of right.
So wrote Ludwig von Mises in The Theory of Money and Credit in 1912. And further:
The sound-money principle has two aspects. It is affirmative in approving the market’s choice of a commonly used medium of exchange. It is negative in obstructing the government’s propensity to meddle with the currency system.
Against this backdrop, modern day monetary systems appear to have been drifting farther and farther away from the sound money principle in the last decades. In all countries of the so-called free world, money represents nowadays a government controlled irredeemable paper, or “fiat,” money standard. The widely held view is that this money system would be compatible with the ideal of a free society and conducive to sustainable output and employment growth.
To be sure, there are voices calling for caution. Taking a historical viewpoint, Milton Friedman stated:
The world is now engaged in a great experiment to see whether it can fashion a different anchor, one that depends on government restraint rather than on the costs of acquiring a physical commodity.
Irving Fisher, evaluating past experience, wrote: “Irredeemable paper money has almost invariably proved a curse to the country employing it.”
The primary cause for concern rests on a key characteristic of government controlled paper money: the system’s unrestrained ability to expand money and credit supply. In contrast, under the (freely chosen) gold standard, money (e.g., gold) supply was expected to increase as well over time,…