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Gold & Silver: The Case For Separation Of Government And Money!
by Patrick A. Heller, CoinWeek.com:
If you asked the average person on the street if government should be responsible for establishing monetary standards and the issuance of circulating money, I suspect that a very high percentage would agree.
In my judgment, those who think that way would be wrong.
The invention of money was a private sector innovation. Merchants and consumers realized long ago that there was a need for a store of value, a unit of account, and a medium of exchange to facilitate trade. Opportunities for direct barter were limited as a baker would not need an entire ox in exchange for a loaf of bread. Therefore, the private sector, through extensive trial and error ended up primarily coming up with money in the form of fungible units of gold and silver. There was no need to call these coins by their government denomination as the intrinsic value of the metal was what was important, not the name of the issuer. Issuers were only important to the extent that they developed a reputation for producing standardized quality coins.
