Today, Money Is NOT an Effective Medium of Exchange, But a Tool of Government for Fleecing Us and for “Managing” the Economy

In fact, in endeavouring to design a better monetary order we at once encounter the difficulty of not really knowing what we want. What would be a really good money? To the present day, money is that part of the market order that government has not allowed to find its most effective form, and on which silly rulers and economists have doctored most. Yet it was not economists or statesmen who invented the market, though some have come to understand it a little; nor is it our present knowledge which can show us the best solutions, but the discoveries made by free experimentation. Those who chiefly needed money as an indispensable tool of trade, and who had first discovered it as a means for making most trade possible, were soon forced to use what money government gave them. And government jealously guarded its monopoly for quite different purposes than those for which money had been introduced. Today, money is not mainly an effective medium of exchange, but chiefly a tool of government for fleecing us and for ‘managing’ the economy. The result is that we are obliged to admit that we have little empirical evidence of how the various conceivable methods of supplying money would operate, and almost none about which kind of money the public would select if it had an opportunity to choose freely between several different and clearly distinguishable kinds of money. For this we must rely largely on our theoretical imagination, and try to apply to a special problem that understanding of the functioning of competition which we have gained elsewhere.

—F. A. Hayek, “The Future Unit of Value,” in The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 6, Good Money, Part II: The Standard, ed. Stephen Kresge (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 240-241.