The Ethics Of Money Production
Written by Jörg Guido Hülsmann.
Consider the case of money production. Here too the additional quantities that leave the production process, when sold, first benefit the first owner: the producer. He can buy more goods and services than he otherwise could have bought, and his spending on these things in turn increases the incomes of his suppliers beyond the level they would otherwise have reached. But the additional money production reduces the purchasing power of money. It follows that it also creates losers, namely, those market participants whose monetary income does not rise at first, but who have to pay right away the higher prices that result when the new money supply spreads step by step into the economy. [...] This distribution effect is a key to understanding monetary economies.
The Ethics of Money Production is the first full study of a critically important issue today: the ethics of money production. Not in the colloquial sense of the phrase 'making money,' but rather the actual production of money as a commodity in 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, Hülsmann's 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.