This pioneering work by Jörg Guido Hülsmann, professor of economics at the University of Angers in France and the author of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, is the first full study of a critically important issue today: the ethics of money production.
He is speaking not in the colloquial sense of the phrase "making money," but rather the actual production of money as a commodity in the whole of economic life.
The choice of the money we use in exchange is not something that needs to be established and fixed by government. In fact, his thesis is that a government monopoly on money production and management has no ethical or economic grounding at all. Legal-tender laws, bailout guarantees, tax-backed deposit insurance, and the entire apparatus that sustains national monetary systems, has been wholly unjustified. Money, he argues, should be a privately produced good like any other, such as clothing or food.
In arguing this way, he is disputing centuries of assumptions about money for which a supporting argument is rarely offered. People just assume that governments or central banks operating under government control should manage money. Hülsmann explores monetary thought from the ancient world through the Middle Ages to modern times to show that the monopolists are wrong. There is a strong case in both economic and ethical terms for the idea that money production should be wholly private.
Hülsmann has provided not only a primer in understanding our times, but a dramatic extension of the work of Menger, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and others to map out an economically radical and ethically challenging case for the complete separation of money and state, and a case for the privatization of money production. It is a sweeping and learned treatise that is rigorous, scholarly, and radical.
