Let Us Deprive Governments or Their Monetary Authorities of ALL Power to Protect Their Money Against Competition

 About a year after being awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, he [Hayek] delivered a lecture on “International Money” in September 1975 at a conference in Switzerland. In early 1976, it was published in London as a monograph under the title Choice in Currency: A Way to Stop Inflation. He explained that under the influence of Keynes and Keynesian domination of monetary and macroeconomic policy, governments were invariably guided by short-run goals in the service of various special-interest groups. The consequence was the constant abuse of the printing press and a resulting price inflation to feed the seemingly insatiable demands of privileged and politically influential groups. 

Hayek now concluded that some method had to be found to free the ordinary citizen from the government’s monopoly control of the medium of exchange. The answer, he suggested, was allowing individuals the freedom to use whatever money they chose, instead of their being captives of the increasingly depreciated monetary unit imposed on the market by the government:

There could be no more effective check against the abuse of money by the government than if people were free to refuse any money they distrusted and to prefer money in which they had confidence. Nor could there be a stronger inducement to governments to ensure the stability of their money than the knowledge that, so long as they kept the supply below the demand for it, that demand would tend to grow. Therefore, let us deprive governments (or their monetary authorities) of all power to protect their money against competition: if they can no longer conceal that their money is becoming bad, they will have to restrict the issue.

    Make it merely legal and people will be very quick indeed to refuse to use the national currency once it depreciates noticeably, and they will make their dealings in a currency they trust.

    The upshot would probably be that the currencies of those countries trusted to pursue a responsible monetary policy would tend to displace gradually those of a less reliable character. The reputation of financial righteousness would become a jealously guarded asset of all issuers of money, since they would know that even the slightest deviation from the path of honesty would reduce the demand for their product.

Hayek’s proposal was for people to have the option to competitively select among the various currencies issued by governments.

—Richard M. Ebeling, “Friedrich A. Hayek and the Case for the Denationalization of Money,” in Monetary Central Planning and the State (Fairfax, VA: Future of Freedom Foundation, 2015), Kindle e-book.

The Intl. Monetary Order of the 19th Century was the Creation of a PLANNING Mentality; Even the Gold Standard Was a Government-Managed System

In his 1942 book, This Age of Fable, German free-market economist Gustav Stolper pointed out:

Hardly ever do the advocates of free capitalism realize how utterly their ideal was frustrated at the moment the state assumed control of the monetary system. . . . A “free” capitalism with government responsibility for money and credit has lost its innocence. From that point on it is no longer a matter of principle but one of expediency how far one wishes or permits governmental interference to go. Money control is the supreme and most comprehensive of all government controls short of expropriation.

Even in the high-water mark of classical liberalism in the 19th century, practically all advocates of the free market and free trade believed that money was the one exception to the principle of private enterprise. The international monetary order of the 19th century, of which Wilhelm Roepke spoke in such glowing terms, was nonetheless the creation of a planning mentality. The decision to “go on” the gold standard in each of the major Western nations was a matter of state policy. 

A central-banking structure for the management and control of a gold-backed currency was established in each country by its respective government, either by giving a private bank the monopoly control over gold reserves and issuing banknotes or by establishing a state institution assigned the task of managing the monetary system within the borders of a nation. The United States was the last of the major Western nations to establish a central bank, but it finally did so in 1913. 

That even the gold standard was a government-managed monetary system was succinctly explained by economist Michael A. Heilperin in his book Aspects of the Pathology of Money (1968).

—Richard M. Ebeling, “The Gold Standard as Government-Managed Money,” in Monetary Central Planning and the State (Fairfax, VA: Future of Freedom Foundation, 2015), Kindle e-book.

The Dream of Economists in the 1920s Was to Stabilize the Buying Power of the Monetary Units Using “Managed Currencies”

In the decades after the First World War, the goals assigned to monetary central planning changed, but the instrument for their application remained the same — central bank management of the money supply. As we have seen, Yale University economist Irving Fisher advocated the stabilization of the price level. As Fisher stated in The Money Illusion (1928),

To stabilize the buying power of the monetary units has long been the dream of economists. . . . And since the volume of circulating credit is controllable and controlled [through the Federal Reserve central bank], we have already a managed currency in spite of ourselves. If we insure scientific management in place of hit-and-miss management we shall thereby attain stabilization.

John Maynard Keynes argued in his Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), “The war has affected a great change. Gold itself has become a ‘managed’ currency. . . . All of us from the Governor of the Bank of England downwards are now primarily interested in preserving the stability of business, prices and employment.” The goal of monetary central planning, in Keynes’s view, as he articulated it in the 1930s, was for monetary policy to support and facilitate government “aggregate demand management” for manipulating the economy-wide levels of employment and output.

—Richard M. Ebeling, “The Gold Standard as Government-Managed Money,” in Monetary Central Planning and the State (Fairfax, VA: Future of Freedom Foundation, 2015), Kindle e-book.

Because Money Serves as the Link Connecting Savings and Investment Decisions, There Could Arise Imbalances in the Savings-Investment Process

In 1898, Wicksell published Interest and Prices. He adapted Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of capital and time-consuming processes of production and took it a step further. Wicksell explained that in actual markets, goods do not trade directly one for the other. Rather, money serves as the intermediary in all transactions, including the transfer of savings to potential borrowers and investors. Individuals save in the form of money income not spent on consumption. They then leave their money savings on deposit with banks, which serve as the financial intermediaries in the market’s intertemporal transactions.

Banks pool the money savings of numerous people and lend those savings to credit-worthy borrowers at the rates of interest that come to prevail in the market and that balance the supply of the savings with the investment demand for it. The borrowers then use the money savings to enter the market and demand the use of resources, capital, and labor by offering money prices for their purchase and hire. Thus, the decrease in the money demand and the lower prices for consumer goods due to savings — and the increased demand and the higher money prices for producer goods due to investment borrowing — act as the market’s method to shift and reallocate resources and labor from consumption purposes to capital-using production purposes.

But Wicksell pointed out that precisely because money served as the intermediary link in connecting savings decisions with investment decisions, there could result a peculiar and perverse imbalance in the savings-investment process. Suppose that the savings in the society was just sufficient to sustain the undertaking and completion of periods of production of one year in length. Now suppose that the government monetary authority in that society were to increase the amount of money available to the banks for lending purposes. To attract borrowers to take the additional lendable funds out of the market, the banks would lower the rates of interest at which they offered to lend to borrowers.

The lower market rates of interest due to the monetary expansion would raise the present value of investment projects with longer time-horizons until their completion. Now suppose that borrowers were consequently to undertake investment projects that involved a period of production of two years in length. Because of their increased money demands for resources and labor for two-year investment projects, some of the factors of production would be drawn away from one-year investment projects. As a result, at the end of the first year, fewer consumer goods would be available for sale to consumers. With fewer consumer goods on the market at the end of the first year, the prices of consumer goods would rise and consumers would have to cut back their purchases of consumer goods in the face of the higher prices. Consumers, Wicksell said, would be forced to save, i.e., they would have to consume less in the present and wait until the second year had passed and the two-year investment projects had been completed to have any greater supply of goods to buy and consume.

At the same time, the greater supply of money offered for resources and goods on the market would be tending to increase their prices and, as a consequence, the society would experience a general price inflation during this process. If the government monetary authority were to repeat its increase of the money supply time-period after time-period, there would be set in motion what Wicksell called an unending “cumulative process” of rising prices.

—Richard M. Ebeling, “The Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle,” in Monetary Central Planning and the State (Fairfax, VA: Future of Freedom Foundation, 2015), Kindle e-book.