(Originally appeared November 27, 2014) Happy Thanksgiving to all of my fellow free bankers out there! Today is our biggest secular national holiday. Not everyone celebrates Christmas or Easter much less other national holidays like Memorial Day or Labor Day, but I don't know anyone who doesn't…
This primer is supposed to introduce readers to the workings of the present U.S. monetary system. So it's only natural that it should take established monetary arrangements for granted, including an official, "fiat" dollar currency managed by the Federal Reserve System. And while I haven't hesitated to…
The Bitcoin system has the great virtue of securely sending value directly from stranger to stranger. It is open to anyone, anywhere in the world. The sender does not need to trust the recipient, nor any bank or other institution, to accurately record the transfer. The Bitcoin…
I fully expected Larry White's recent post challenging the state theory of money, and particularly that theory's understanding of the origins of metallic coinage, to generate some critical feedback. In particular, I expected it to raise the hackles of "Lord Keynes" (henceforth LK), the otherwise anonymous author…
I've begun working on a new book on the gold standard. In the first chapter I plan to discuss the origin of money, as a preliminary to discussing how silver and gold became the world's dominant commodity monies. The topic of the origin of money has become…