Dr. Harry Binswanger makes a clear case for Monetary Freedom over at Forbes where he argues that “There is no justification for the Federal Reserve System or for any government intervention regarding money. The government should neither impose gold nor forbid it.”
In fact he goes on to say…
How far would I take this line of thought? All the way.
A case in point. I agree with Jean Baptiste Say, the great 19th century economist, that we should not use national currencies, or even introduce words to canonize them. There is no rational need for the terms “dollar”–or “franc” or “peso” or “shekel.
We call a bushel of wheat a bushel of wheat. We call a pound of butter a pound of butter. We can call an ounce of gold an ounce of gold. A car’s price could be 10.30 gold ounces. Or, because gold has such a high unit value, we could use the gold gram, and quote the price as 315 gold grams.
A gold gram is a gold gram whether it’s used in America, France, Mexico, or Israel. Nor does an ounce of silver vary with lines drawn on the map. And when people are free to choose their money, gold and silver win the market competition. (If, in the future, something else wins, so be it.)
So one reason why the government should not “define the dollar as a certain weight of gold” is that we should jettison the term “dollar.” It’s an obfuscatory term. “Dollar,” “franc” and the like inject into men’s thinking an intermediary between money and the money commodity. That paves the way for government debasement of money.
Let Washington try to declare that an ounce is now four-fifths of an ounce.
Monetary freedom is the only sure means of protecting the integrity of our medium of exchange and store of value. Freedom in general is the only sure means of protecting the integrity of our lives–our ability to act on our own best judgment.
Read the full article Free Money! Then Free The Rest Of The Economy – Forbes.