Notes

[1] The precise ratio of gold weights amounted to defining the pound sterling as equal to $4.86656.

[2] Actually, if they had been consistent in their devotion to a fixed definition, the Spahr group should have advocated a return to gold at $20 an ounce, the long-standing definition before Franklin B. Roosevelt began tampering with the gold price in 1933. The “Spahr group” consisted of two organizations: The Economists’ National Committee on Monetary Policy, headed by Professor Walter E. Spahr of New York University; and an allied laymen’s activist group, headed by Philip McKenna, called The Gold Standard League. Spahr expelled Henry Hazlitt from the former organization for the heresy of advocating return to gold at a far higher price (or lower weight).

[3] At one point, the price of gold reached $850, and is now lingering in the area of $350 an ounce. While gold bugs like to mope about the alleged failure of gold to rise still further, it should be noted that even this “depressed” gold price is tenfold the alleged eternally fixed rate of $35 an ounce. One side effect of the rising market price of gold was to ensure the total disappearance of the Spahr group. Thirty-five dollar gold is now not even a legal fiction; it is dead and buried, and it is safe to say that no one, of any school of thought, will want to resurrect it.

[4] For a critique of some of these schemes, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Aurophobia, Or: Free Banking On What Standard?”, Review of Austrian Economics 6, no. 1(1992); and Rothbard, “The Case for a Genuine Gold Dollar,” in Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., ed. The Gold Standard: An Austrian Perspective (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1985), pp. 1-17.

[5] Economic Research Department, Chamber of Commerce of the United States, The Mystery of Money (Washington, DC.: Chamber of Commerce, 1953), p. 1.

[6] A person could also receive money from producers by inheritance or other gift, but here again the ultimate giver must have been a producer. Furthermore, we may say that the recipient “produced” some intangible service—for instance, of being a son and heir—which provided the reason for the giver’s contribution.

[7] The American “wildcat bank” did not print money itself, but rather bank notes supposedly redeemable in money.

[8] On the process of emergence of money on the market, see the classic exposition of Carl Menger in his Principles of Economics, translated and edited by James Dingwall and Bert F. Hoselitz (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1950), pp. 257-85.

[9] The exchange rate between gold and silver will inevitably be at or near their purchasing-power parities, in terms of the social array of goods available, and this rate would tend to be uniform throughout the world. For a brilliant exposition of the nature of the geographic purchasing power of money, and the theory of purchasing-power parity, see Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), pp. 170-86. Also see Chi-Yuen Wu, An Outline of International Price Theories (London: Routledge, 1939), pp. 233-34.

Since I am advocating a totally free market in money, what I am strictly proposing is not so much the gold standard as parallel gold and silver standards. By this, of course I do not mean bimetallism, with its arbitrarily fixed exchange rate between gold and silver, but freely fluctuating exchange rates between the two moneys. For an illuminating account of how parallel standards worked historically and how they were interfered with, see Luigi Einaudi, “The Theory of Imaginary Money from Charlemagne to the French Revolution,” in Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma, eds., Enterprise and Secular Change (Homewood, Ill.: Irwin, 1953), pp. 229-61.

Professor Robert Sabatino Lopez writes, of the return of Europe to gold coinage in the mid-thirteenth century, after half a millennium: “Florence, like most medieval states, made bimetallism and trimetallism a base of its monetary policy... it committed the government to the Sysiphean labor of readjusting the relations between different coins as the ratio between the different metals changes, or as one or another coin was debased... Genoa, on the contrary, in conformity with the principle of restricting state intervention as much as possible [italics mine], did not try to enforce a fixed relation between coins of different metals. Basically, the gold coinage of Genoa was not meant to integrate the silver and bullion coinages but to form an independent system” (“Back to Gold, 1251,” Economic History Review [April 1956]: 224).

On the merits of parallel standards and their superiority to bimetallism, see William Brough, Open Mints and Free Banking (New York: Putnam, 1898), and Brough, The Natural Law of Money (New York: Putnam, 1894). Brough called this system “Free Metallism.” On the recent example of pure parallel standards in Saudi Arabia, down to the 1950s, see Arthur N. Young, “Saudi Arabian Currency and Finance,” Middle East Journal (Summer 1953): 361-80.

[10] The fact that there was never an actual pound-weight coin of silver is irrelevant and does not imply that the pound was some form of “imaginary” unit of account. The pound was a pound of silver bullion, or an accumulation of a pound weight of silver coins. Cf. Einaudi, “Theory of Imaginary Money,” pp. 229-30. The fundamental misconception here is to place too much emphasis on coins and not enough on bullion, an overemphasis, as we shall see presently connected intimately with government intervention and with the long slide downward of the monetary unit from weight of gold and silver to pure name.

[11] The monetary unit was not just a pure unit of weight, such as the ounce or the gram; it was a unit of weight of a certain money commodity, such as gold. The dollar was 1/20 of an ounce of gold, not of just any ounce. And hero we find a crucial flaw in the idea of a composite-commodity money which has been overlooked: Just as we cannot call the monetary unit an “ounce” or “gram” or “pound” of several different, or composite, commodities, so the dollar cannot properly be the name of many different weights of many different commodities. The money commodity selected by the market was a single particular commodity, gold or silver, and therefore the unit of that money had to be of that commodity alone, and not of some arbitrary composite.

[12] This is why, in the older books, a discussion of money and monetary standards often take place as part of a general discussion of weights and measures. Thus in Barnard’s work on international unification of weights and measures, the problem of international unification of monetary units was discussed in an appendix, along with other appendixes on measures of capacity and metric system. Frederick A. P. Barnard, The Metric System of Weights and Measures, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia College, 1872).

[13] Ludwig von Mises developed the very important regression theorem in his Theory of Money and Credit, pp. 97-123, and defended it against the criticisms of Benjamin M. Anderson and Howard S. Ellis in his Human Action (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 405-08. Also see Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 1090. For a reply to Professor J. C. Gilbert’s contention that the establishment of the Rentenmark disproved the regression theorem, see Murray N. Rothbard “Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics,” in Mary Sennholz, ed., On Freedom and Free Enterprise (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1956), p. 236n.

The latest criticism of the regression theorem is that of Professor Patinkin, who accuses Mises of inconsistency in basing this theorem on deriving the marginal utility of money from the marginal utility of the goods that it will purchase, rather than from the marginal utility of cash holdings the latter approach being used by Mises in the remainder of his work. Actually, the regression theorem in Mises’ system is not inconsistent, but operates on a different plane, for it shows that the very marginal utility of money to hold—as elsewhere analyzed by Mises—is itself based upon the prior fact that money has a purchasing power in goods. Don Patinkin, Money, Interest, and Prices (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson 1956), pp. 71-72, 414.

[14] Presumably, on the free market private citizens will also safeguard their coins by testing their weight and purity—as they do their monetary bullion—or will mint coins with those private minters who have established reputations for probity and efficiency. Even in the heyday of the gold standard there were few writers willing to go beyond the bounds of social habit to concede the feasibility of private minting. A notable exception was Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York: Appleton, 1890), pp. 488-89. The French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu also favored free private coinage. See Charles A. Conant, The Principles of Money and Banking (New York: Harper, 1905), vol.1, pp. 127-28. Also see Leonard K. Read, Government—An Ideal Concept (Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic Education, 1954), pp. 82ff. Recently Professor Milton Friedman, though completely out of sympathy with the gold standard has, remarkably, taken a similar stand in A Program for Monetary Stability (New York: Fordham University Press, 1960), p. 5.

For historical examples of successful private coinage, see B. W. Barnard, “The Use of Private Tokens for Money in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (1916-47): 617-26; Conant, vol. 1, pp. 127-32; Lysander Spooner, A Letter to Grover Cleveland (Boston: Tucker, 1886), p. 69; and J. Laurence Laughlin, A New Exposition of Money, Credit and Prices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), vol. 1, pp. 47-51.

[15] Thus, see W. Stanley Jevons’ criticism of Spencer in his Money and the Mechanism of Exchange, 15th ed. (London: Kegan Paul, 1905), pp. 63-66.

[16] See Mises, Human Action, pp. 432n, 447, 754. Mises was partly anticipated at the turn of the century by William Brough: “The more efficient money will always drive from the circulation the less efficient if the individuals who handle money are left free to act in their own interest. It is only when bad money is endorsed by the State with the property of legal tender that it can drive good money from circulation” (Open Mints and Free Banking, pp. 35-36)

[17] The minting monopoly also permitted the state to charge a monopoly price (“seigniorage”) for its minting service, which imposed a special burden on conversion from bullion to coin. In later years the state granted the subsidy of costless coinage, over-stimulating the transformation of bullion to coin. Modern adherents of the gold standard unfortunately endorse the subsidy of gratuitous coinage. Where coinage is private and marketable, the firms will of course charge a fee covering approximately the true costs of minting (such a fee is known as “brassage”).

[18] Besides the minting monopoly, the other critical device for government control of money has been legal-tender laws, superfluous at best, mischievous and a means of arbitrary exchange-rate fixing at worst. As William Brough stated: There is no more case for a special law to compel the receiving of money than there is for one to compel the receiving of wheat or of cotton. The common law is as adequate for the enforcement of contracts in the one case as in the other” (The Natural Law of Money, p. 135). The same position was taken by T. H. Farrer, Studies in Currency, 1898 (London: Macmillan, 1898), pp. 42ff.

[19] This is a corollary of Franz Oppenheimer’s brilliant distinction between the two basic alternate routes to wealth, production and exchange, which he called “the economic means”; and seizure or confiscation, which he called “the political means” Inflation, which I am defining here as the creation of money (i.e., an increase of money substitutes not backed 100 percent by standard specie), is thus revealed as one of the major political means. Oppenheimer defined the state, incidentally, as the organization of the political means” (The State [New York: Vanguard Press, 1926], pp. 24ff.).

[20] It is a commonly accepted myth that the excess of wildcat banks in America stemmed from free banking; actually a much stronger cause was the tradition, beginning in 1814 and continuing in every economic crisis thereafter, of permitting banks to continue in operation without paying in specie.

It is also a widespread myth that central banks are inaugurated in order to check inflation by commercial banks. The second Bank of the United States, on the contrary, was inaugurated in 1817 as an inflationist sop to the state-chartered banks, which had been permitted to run riot without paying in specie since 1814. It was a weak substitute for compelling a genuine return to specie payments. This was correctly pointed out at the time by such hard-money stalwarts as Daniel Webster and John Randolph of Roanoke. Senator William H. Wells, Federalist of Delaware, said that the Bank Bill was “ostensibly for the purpose of correcting the diseased state of our paper currency by restraining and curtailing the overissue of bank paper, and yet it came prepared to Inflict upon us the same evil; being itself nothing more than simply a paper-making machine.” Annals of Congress, 14 Cong., 1 Sess., April 1, 1816, pp. 267-70. Also see ibid., pp. 1066, 1091, 1110ff.

As for the Federal Reserve System, the major arguments for its adoption were to make the money supply more “elastic” and to centralize reserves and thus make them more “efficient,” i.e., to facilitate and promote inflation.. As an additional fillip, reserve requirements themselves were directly lowered at the inauguration of the Federal Reserve System. Cf. the important but totally neglected work of C. A. Phillips, T. F. McManus, and R. W. Nelson, Banking and the Business Cycle (New York: Macmillan, 1937), pp 21ff, and passim. Also see O. K. Burrel, “The Coming Crisis in External Convertibility in U. S. Gold,” Commercial and Financial Chronicle (April 23, 1959): 5.

For a discussion of the historical arguments on free or central banking see Vera C. Smith, The Rationale of Central Banking (London: King, 1936).

[21] During the Panic the economist Condy Raguet, state senator from Philadelphia, wrote to a puzzled David Ricardo as follows: “You state in your letter that you find it difficult to comprehend, why persons who had a right to demand coin from the Banks in payment of their notes so long forbore to exercise it. This no doubt appears paradoxical to one who resides in a country where an act of parliament was necessary to protect a bank, but the difficulty is easily solved. The whole of our population are either stockholders of banks or in debt to them... An independent man, who was neither a stockholder or debtor, who would have ventured to compel the banks to do justice, would have been persecuted as an enemy of society...” Raguet to Ricardo, Apri1 18, 1821, in David Ricardo, Minor Papers on the Currency Question, 1809-23, ed. Jacob Hollander (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1932), pp. 199-201.

In 1931, for example, President Hoover launched a crusade against “traitorous hoarding.” The crusade consisted of the Citizens’ Reconstruction Organization, headed by Colonel Frank Knox of Chicago. And Jesse Jones reports that, during the banking crisis of early 1933, Hoover was seriously contemplating invoking a forgotten wartime law making hoarding a criminal offense. Jesse H. Jones and Edward Angly, Fifty Billion Dollars (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p. 18. It should also be noted here that the Hoover administration’s alleged devotion to retaining the gold standard is largely myth. As Hoover’s Undersecretary of the Treasury has declared rather proudly: “The going off [gold] cannot be laid to Franklin Roosevelt. It had been determined to be necessary by Ogden Mills, Secretary of the Treasury, and myself as his Undersecretary, long before Franklin Roosevelt took office.” Arthur A. Ballantine, in the New York Herald-Tribune, May 5, 1958, p. 18.

[22] Currently, the worst example of government aid to banks is the highly popular deposit insurance—for this means that banks have virtual carte blanche from government to protect them from any redemption crisis. As a result, virtually all natural market checks on bank inflation have been destroyed. Query: If banks are thus protected from losses by government, to what extent are they still private institutions?

[23] The other very important difference, of course, is that I advocate 100 percent reserves in gold or silver, in contrast to the 100 percent fiat paper standard of the Chicago School. One-hundred percent gold, rather than making the monetary system more readily manageable by government, would completely expunge government intervention from the monetary system.

[24] I want to make it quite clear that I do not accuse present-day bankers of conscious fraud or embezzlement; the institution of banking has become so hallowed and venerated that we can only say that it allows for legalized fraud, probably unknown to almost all bankers. As for the original goldsmiths that began the practice, I think our opinion should be rather more harsh.

[25] It is usual to reckon the acceptance of a deposit which can be drawn upon at any time by means of note or checks as a type of credit transaction and juristically, this view is, of course, justified; but economically, the case is not one of a credit transaction. If credit in the economic sense means the exchange of a present good or a present service against a future good or a future service, then it is hardly possible to include the transactions in question under the conception of credit. A depositor of a sum of money who acquires in exchange for it a claim convertible into money at any time which will perform exactly the same service for him as the sum it refers to has exchanged no present good for a future good. The claim that he has acquired by his deposit is also a present good for him. The depositing of money in no way means that he has renounced immediate disposal over the utility that it commands.” Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 268. What I am advocating, in brief, is a change in the juristic framework to conform to the economic realities.

[26] Professor Beckhart has recently called our attention to the long-standing and successful practice of Swiss banks of issuing debentures of varying maturities, and the recent adoption of this practice in Belgium and Holland. While Beckhart contemplates debentures for long-term loans only, I see no reason why banks cannot issue short-term debentures as well. If business needs short-term loans, it can finance them by competing with everyone else in the market for voluntarily saved funds. Why grant the short-term market the special privilege and subsidy of creating money? Benjamin H. Beckhart, “To Finance Term Loans,” New York Times, May 31, 1960.

[27] A bailment may be defined as the transfer of personal property to another person with the understanding that the property is to be returned when a certain purpose has been completed... In a sale, we relinquish both title and possession. In a bailment we merely give up temporarily the possession of the goods.” Robert O. Sklar and Benjamin W. Palmer, Business Law (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1942), p. 361.

Nussbaum surely begs the question when he says “Only in a broad and non-technical sense may the relationship of the depository bank to the depositor be considered a fiduciary one. No trust proper or bailment is involved. The contrary view would lay an unbearable burden upon banking business” (italics mine). But if such banking business is improper, this is precisely the sort of burden that should be imposed. This is but one example of what happens to jurisprudence when pragmatic considerations of “public policy” supplant the search for principles of justice. Arthur Nussbaum, Money in the Law, National and International (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Foundation Press, 1950), p. 105.

[28] On warehouse receipts as bailments, cf. William H. Spencer, Casebook of Law and Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), pp. 661ff.

Perhaps a proper legal system would also consider all “general deposit warrants” (which allow the warehouse to return any homogeneous good to the depositor) as really specific deposit warrants,” which, like bills of lading, establish ownership to specific, earmarked objects.

As Jevons, noting the superiority of specific deposit warrants and realizing their relationship to money, stated: “The most satisfactory kind of promissory document... is represented by bills of lading, pawn-tickets, dock-warrants, or certificates which establish ownership to a definite object. The important point concerning such promissory notes is, that they cannot possibly be issued in excess of the goods actually deposited, unless by distinct fraud [italics mine]. The issuer ought to act purely as a warehouse-keeper, and as possession may be claimed at any time, he can never legally allow any object deposited to go out of his safe keeping until it is delivered back in exchange for the promissory note... More recently a better system [than general deposit warrant] has been introduced, and each specific lot of iron has been marked and set aside to meet some particular warrant. The difference seems to be slight, but it is really very important, as opening the way to a lax fulfillment of the contract... Moreover, it now [with general warrants] becomes possible to create a fictitious supply of a commodity, that is, to make people believe that a supply exists which does not exist... It used to be held as a general rule of law, that any present grant or assignment of goods not in existence is without operation” (Money and the Mechanism of Exchange, pp. 206-12; see also p. 221).

[29] A bank that fails is therefore not simply an entrepreneur whose forecasts have gone awry. It is business whose betrayal of trust has been publicly revealed. Furthermore, a rule of every business is to adjust the time structure of its assets to the time structure of its liabilities, so that its assets on hand will match its liabilities due. The only exception to this rule is a bank, which lends at certain terms of maturities, while its liabilities are all instantly payable on demand. If a bank were to match the time structure of its assets and liabilities, all its assets would also have to be instantaneous, i.e., would have to be cash.

[30]The Science of Wealth, 3d ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1867), p. 139. In the same work, Walker presents a keen analysis of the defects and problems of a fractional-reserve currency (pp. 126-222).

[31] See Mises Human Action, pp. 439ff. Mises’ position is that of the French economist Henri Cernuschi, who called for free banking as the best way of suppressing fiduciary bank credit: “I want to give everybody the right to issue banknotes so that nobody should take banknotes any longer” (ibid., p. 443). The German economist Otto Hübner held a similar position. See Smith, Rationale of Central Banking, passim.

[32] In short, our projected legal reform would fully comply with Mises’ goal: “to place the banking business under the general rules of commercial and civil laws compelling every individual and firm to fulfill all obligations in full compliance with the terms of the contract (Human Action, p. 440). Another point about free banking: to be tenable it would have to be legal for 100 percent reserve partisans to establish “Anti-Bank Vigilante Leagues,” publicly calling on all note and deposit holders to redeem their obligations because their banks were really and essentially bankrupt.

[33] Cf. Walker, pp. 230-31. In A Program for Monetary Stability, p.108, Milton Friedman has expressed sympathy for the idea of free banking, but oddly enough only for deposits; notes he would leave as a government monopoly. It should be clear that there is no essential economic difference between notes and deposits. They differ in technological form only; economically, they are both promises to pay on demand in a fixed amount of standard money.

[34] The totally neglected political theorist Isabel Paterson wrote as follows on the “compensated” or “commodity dollar” scheme of Irving Fisher, which would have juggled the weight of the dollar in order to stabilize its value: “As all units of measure are determined arbitrarily in the first place, though not fixed by law, obviously they can be altered bylaw. The same length of cotton could be designated an inch one day, a foot the next, and a yard the next; the same quantity of precious metal could be denominated ten cents today and a dollar tomorrow. But the net result would be that figures used on different days would not mean the same thing; and somebody must take a heavy loss. The alleged argument for a ‘commodity dollar’ was that a real dollar, of fixed quantity, will not always buy the same quantity of goods. Of course it will not. If there is no medium of value, no money, neither would a yard of cotton or a pound of cheese always exchange for an unvarying fixed quantity of any other goods. It was argued that a dollar ought always to buy the same quantity of and description of goods. It will not and cannot. That could occur only if the same number of dollars and the same quantities of goods of all kinds and in every kind were always in existence and in exchange and always in exactly proportionate demand; while if production and consumption were admitted, both must proceed constantly at an equal rate to offset one another” (The God of the Machine [New York: Putnam, 1943], p. 203n).

[35] Leland B. Yeager, “An Evaluation of Freely-Fluctuating Exchange Rates,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1952.

[36] Ibid., pp. 9-17

[37] Professor Yeager indeed concedes that an independent money for each person or firm would be going too far. “Beyond some admittedly indefinable point, the proliferation of separate currencies for ever smaller and more narrowly defined territories would begin to negate the very concept of money.” But our contention is that the “indefinable point” is precisely definable as the very first point that fiat paper enters to break up the world’s money. See Leland B. Yeager, “Exchange Rates within a Common Market,” Social Research (Winter 1958): 436-37.

[38] Other criticisms by Yeager are really, as he recognizes at one point, criticisms of any plan for 100 percent banking, fiat or gold. There is, for example, the problem of how to suppress new forms of demand liabilities that might well arise to evade the legal restrictions. I do not think this an important argument. Fraud is always difficult to combat, and indeed continues in numerous forms to this day (as does all manner of crime). Does this mean that we should give up outlawing and punishing fraud and other crimes against person and property? Secondly, I am sure that the practical problems of law enforcement would be greatly reduced if the public were to receive a thorough education in the fundamentals of banking. If, in short, 100-percent-money advocates were allowed to form Anti-Bank Vigilante Leagues to point out the shakiness and immorality of fractional-reserve banking, the public would be much less inclined to evade such restrictions than it is now.

[39]Pace the Mises-Hayek theory of the trade cycle, which was shunted aside but not refuted by the Keynesian Revolution.

[40]Report of the Subcommittee on Monetary, Credit, and Financial Policies of the Joint Committee on the Economic Report, 81 Cong., 2 Sess. (Washington 1950), pp. 41ff.

[41] The conservative economic historians of the late nineteenth century saw Jackson as an ignorant agrarian trying to destroy capitalism and calling for inflation against the central bank. The progressives of the Beard school took much the same approach, except that they applauded the Jacksonians for their alleged anti-capitalist stand. The most recent Bray Hammond-Thomas Govan school have again shifted their praise to the Whigs and the Bank of the United States, which they view as essential to a modern credit system as against the absurdly hard-money views of the Jacksonians.

[42] During the Panic of 1819, for example—several years before Thomas Joplin’s enunciation of the currency principle in England—Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Governor Thomas Randolph of Virginia, Daniel Raymond (author of the first treatise on economics in the United States), Condy Raguet, and Amos Kendall all wrote in favor of either a pure 100 percent gold money, or of 100 percent gold backing for paper. See Murray N. Rothbard, “The Panic of 1819: Contemporary Opinion and Policy,” Ph.D. dissertation (Columbia University, 1956). John Adams considered the issue of paper beyond specie as “theft,” aid Raymond called the practice a “stupendous fraud.” Similar views were held by the important French ideologue and economist, and friend of Jefferson, Count Destutt de Tracy. Cf. Michael J. L. O’Connor, Origins of Academic Economies in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. 28, 38.

[43] Failure of the British currency school to realize this Led to the discrediting of Peel’s Act of 1844, which required 100 percent reserve for all further issue of bank notes, but left bank deposits completely free.

[44] On Carroll, see Lloyd W. Mints, A History of Banking Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), pp. 129, 135ff., 155-56; and especially the collection of Carroll’s writings, Organization of Debt into Currency and Other Papers, Edward C. Simmons, ed. (Salem, N.Y.: Ayer, 1972).

[45] Isaiah W. Sylvester, Bullion Certificates as Currency (New York, 1882). On parallel standards, also see Brough, Open Mints and Free Banking, passim. For Brough’s attack on the disruption caused by independent currency names, see ibid., p. 93.

[46] Thus Groseclose: “The practice of the goldsmiths, of using deposited funds to their own interest and profit, was essentially unsound, if not actually dishonest and fraudulent. A warehouseman, taking goods deposited with him and devoting them to his own profit, either by use or by loan to another, is guilty of a tort, a conversion of goods for which he is liable in... law. By casuistry which is now elevated into an economic principle, but which has no defenders outside the realm of banking, a warehouseman who deals in money is subject to a diviner law: the banker is free to use for his private interest and profit the money left in trust...

“Sooner or later we must abandon the pretense that we can eat our cake and have it, that we may have money on deposit ready to be withdrawn at any moment, and at the same time loaned out in a thousand diverse enterprises, and recognize that the only assurance of liquidity of bank deposits is to have the actual money waiting on the depositor at whatever moment he may appear. This would not mean the extinction of credit, nor the disappearance of lending institutions. But it would mean the divorcement of credit from the money mechanism, the cessation of the use of credit instruments as media of exchange. It would mean the disappearance of the most insidious form of fictitious credit. We could still have investment banking providing credit at long term, and bill brokers and finance companies, providing credit at short term; but such credit would not be the transfer of a fictitious purchasing power drawn from the reservoirs of a banking system whose own sources derive from the use of the bank check; the credit available would be true credit that is, the transfer of actual, existing wealth in exchange for wealth to be created and returned at a future time. Such credit would not be inflationary, as is bank credit, for every dollar made available as purchasing power to the borrower would be the result of the abstinence from the exercise of purchasing power on the part of the lender; it would be merely the transfer of purchasing power, not the creation of purchasing power by fiction” (Money, The Human Conflict [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934], pp. 178, 273).

Professor F.A. Hayek, in his Monetary Nationalism and International Stability (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937), was highly sympathetic to 100 percent gold, and demonstrated, in some excellent analysis the superiority of 100 percent gold to the mixed, fractional-reserve gold standard and to independent fiat moneys. In the end, he apparently set aside the proposal because of the difficulties of bank evasion; moreover, he concluded, rather inconsistently, by considering the ideal monetary system as directed by an international central bank, with the gold standard as only second best. Robbins, while discussing 100 percent money, was more sympathetic to free banking under a gold standard. Lionel Robbins, Economic Planning and International Order (London: Macmillan, 1937). pp. 269-305. In recent years, Hayek has abandoned the gold standard completely on behalf of a composite-commodity standard: “A Commodity Reserve Currency,” in his Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), pp. 209-19. Since Hayek’s major reason for the shift is that the total supply of gold is not flexible enough to change when demanded (and since, even in his earlier work Hayek wrote of a “rationally” determined total supply of world money, regulated by an international monetary authority), it is clear that Hayek does not see that no specific total supply of money is better than any other, and that therefore no government manipulation of the supply is desirable.

[47] For an eloquent plea for using pure units of weight for money instead of national names, see Jean-Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy, New American ed. (Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliot, 1841), pp. 256ff. Say also favored a freely fluctuating market between gold and silver.

More recently, Everett R. Taylor has advocated private coinage of gold and silver, and a 100 percent gold dollar, while another writer, Oscar B. Johannsen, has favored private coinage and free banking under a gold standard. Taylor, Progress Report on a New Bill of Rights (Diablo, Calif.: privately published, 1954); Johannsen, “Advocates Unrestricted Private Control Over Money and Banking” Commercial and Financial Chronicle (June 12, 1958): 2622ff.

[48] See Barnard, Metric System of Weights and Measures, and Henry B. Russell, International Monetary Conferences (New York: Harper, 1898), p. 61.

[49] Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, pt. 4; and Henry Hazlitt, Return to Gold (New York: Newsweek, 1954).

[50] Clarence Philbrook, “‘Realism’ in Policy Espousal,” American Economic Review (December 1953): 846-59.