Brown, Pamela. “Constitution or Competition? Alternative Views on Monetary Reform.” Literature of Liberty 5 (Autumn 1982): 7–52
Excerpt:
Money, for practically as long as it has existed, has been employed to realize two fundamentally different sorts of goals: production or plunder. In a market economy, private individuals routinely use monetary institutions in a cooperative way to achieve voluntary exchanges of goods and services. Political authorities, by contrast, use monetary institutions in a non-cooperative way to achieve involuntary transfers of wealth.
As a means for realizing cooperatively achieved ends, the use of money signals a great social advance over its predecessor, direct barter exchange. Carl Menger provided the classical invisible hand or spontaneous order explanation of the process of natural social evolution from barter to commodity money.
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