num_pages: 280
description: This pioneering work in hardback by Jrg Guido Hlsmann professor of economics at the University of Angers in France and the author of The Last knight of Liberalism  is the first full study of a critically important issue 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 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 an argument is rarely offered. People just assume that government or central banks operating under government control should manage money. Hulsmann 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. He takes on the stabilization advocates to show that government management doesn't lead to stability but to inflation and instability. He goes further to argue against even the theoretical case for stabilization to say that money's value should be governed by the market and that that the costs associated with private production are actually an advantage. He chronicles the decline of money once nationalized from legally sanctioned counterfeiting to the creation of paper money all the way to hyperinflation.
language: English
title: The Ethics of Money Production
publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute