Written in the same year that he testified before the Currency Commission in Austria-Hungary and first published in English in 1892, Carl Menger's On the Origins of Money explains that it is not government edicts that create money, but rather the marketplace.
"Man himself is the beginning and the end of every economy," Menger wrote, and so it is with deciding what is to be traded as money. "Money has not been generated by law. In its origin it is a social, and not a state institution. Sanction by the authority of the state is a notion alien to it."
This is the first time this essay has been available in more than a century. Doug French provides the foreword.
