Towards a Free Market Monetary System

“Towards a Free Market Monetary System.” The Journal of Libertarian Studies 3, no. 1 (1979): 1–8.

When a little over two years ago, at the second Lausanne Conference  of this group, I threw out, almost as a sort of bitter joke, that there was no hope of ever again having decent money, unless we took from governments the monopoly of issuing money and handed over to private industry. I took it only half seriously. But the suggestion proved extraordinarily fertile. Following it up I discovered that I had opened a possibility which in 2000 years no single economist had ever studied. There were quite a number of people who have since taken it up and we have devoted a great  deal of study and analysis to this possibility. As a result I am more convinced  than ever that if we ever again are going to have a decent money, it will not  come from government: it will be issued by private enterprise, because  providing the public with good money which it can trust and use can not  only be an extremely profitable business; it imposes on the issuer a discipline to which the government has never been and cannot be subject.

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