Free banking as a policy ideal is the result of applying the norms of classical liberalism to money and banking. Classical liberalism upholds individual liberty and private property rights, including freedom of contract, under the rule of law. It opposes rule by unconstrained authorities. Skipping over ancient…
At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has a post on the New Monetary Economics. He says, If you’re looking for a definition of the NME, I would say it is the study of unusual monetary arrangements involving either explicit prices for monetary media of exchange (i.e., separating money’s…
"In the next few days the situation would grow much worse, and the interconnected nature of the relationships among the nation's financial institutions would only enable the contagion to spread." The question I pose is which set of circumstances is the author of this passage describing? Was…
Free bankers have been fighting a war on two fronts. On one they face champions of central banking and managed money. On the other they struggle against advocates of 100-percent reserve banking. Although the second front is a lot smaller than the first, it’s far from being…
Brad asked about the free banking book classics. What I had already planned to write, below, partly answers his question. Current thinking about free banking began with Friedrich Hayek’s 1976 pamphlet Denationalisation of Money (link is to an expanded version first issued in 1978 and reprinted in…