Denationalisation of Money: Friedrich Hayek - 1990

The government monopoly of money must be abolished to stop the recurring bouts of acute inflation and deflation that have become accentuated during the last seventy years.Abolition is also the cure for the most deep-seated disease of the recurring waves of depression and unemployment attributed to 'capitalism'. The monopoly of money by the government has relieved it of the need to keep its expenditure within its revenue and has thus precipitated the spectacular increase in government expenditure over the last forty years. Abolition of the monopoly of money would make it increasingly impossible for government to restrict the international movement of men, money and capital that safeguard the ability of dissidents to escape oppression. The urgency of competition in currency requires to be demonstrated to the public by a Free Money Movement, comparable to the Free Trade Movement of the nineteenth century. In the third edition of his classic, Professor Hayek argues that the problem of recurrent inflation is due to government monopoly provision of money, competition being the solution.