Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined - Friedrich A. Hayek

http://library.mises.org/books/Friedrich%20A%20Hayek/Denationalisation%20of%20Money%20The%20Argument%20Refined.pdf

What if the government let anyone use a currency of his or her choosing? What if the government permitted entrepreneurs to innovate in the monetary sector, such as by creating digital currencies or minting commodity money?

This is precisely what F.A. Hayek argues.

By special arrangement with the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Mises Institute is pleased to offer a new printing of F.A. Hayek's most radical case for the complete privatization of money: The Denationalisation of Money. He wrote this near the end of his career, after thinking through all the economic arguments for monetary reform and examining the political viability of various proposals. He shows the essential unviability of government money, and calls for a complete free market in the production and distribution and management of money.

This book is the very core of the Hayekian approach to monetary policy, and the book that drew the world's attention to this radical thinker following his Nobel Prize in economics. The argument is substantively similar to Mises's but rather than a gold standard, Hayek argues for completely abandoning government attempts to reform money. The result would be competitive private currencies that permits the market alone to choose the dominant currency the world over.

In the digital age, his argument takes on new significance, as experimentation in digital currencies continues apace.

Hayek on Moral Values & Altruism

Check out this nice little video of FA Hayek. It won't take long, but it will give you a lot. Hayek shows there how morality has never come from Governments but how morality can only come from individuals. There is no such thing as a collective brain.

Friedrick Hayek - Road To Serfdom

Next intellectual hero on our archives is Friedrich Hayek. He`s eloquent book Road To Serfdom is draws a troubling picture and its timeless message is really serious when compared to the happenings all around us.

http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/upldbook351pdf.pdf

This spell-binding book is a classic in the history of liberal ideas. It was singularly responsible for launching an important debate on the relationship between political and economic freedom. It made the author a world-famous intellectual. It set a new standard for what it means to be a dissident intellectual. It warned of a new form of despotism enacted in the name of liberation. And though it appeared in 1944, it continues to have a remarkable impact. No one can consider himself well-schooled in modern political ideas without having absorbed its lessons.

What F.A. Hayek saw, and what most all his contemporaries missed, was that every step away from the free market and toward government planning represented a compromise of human freedom generally and a step toward a form of dictatorship--and this is true in all times and places. He demonstrated this against every claim that government control was really only a means of increasing social well-being. Hayek said that government planning would make society less liveable, more brutal, more despotic. Socialism in all its forms is contrary to freedom.

Nazism, he wrote, is not different in kind from Communism. Further, he showed that the very forms of government that England and America were supposedly fighting abroad were being enacted at home, if under a different guise. Further steps down this road, he said, can only end in the abolition of effective liberty for everyone.

Capitalism, he wrote, is the only system of economics compatible with human dignity, prosperity, and liberty. To the extent we move away from that system, we empower the worst people in society to manage what they do not understand.

The beauty of this book is not only in its analytics but in its style, which is unrelenting and passionate. Even today, the book remains a source of controversy. Socialists who imagine themselves to be against dictatorship cannot abide his argument, and they never stop attempting to refute it.

Misesians might find themselves disappointed that Hayek did not go far enough, and made too many compromises in the course of his argument. Even so, anyone who loves liberty cannot but feel a sense of gratitude that this book exists and remains an important part of the debate today.