I critically consider four purported economic-efficiency arguments for egalitarian redistribution of income or wealth. (1) Jeremy Bentham's “greatest aggregate happiness” criterion has been used (by Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, A. C. Pigou, Abba Lerner, and more recently...

An uncommon approach to US monetary reform, exemplified by F. A. Hayek's 1976 monograph Choice in Currency, is to end legal barriers to alternative monies, whether as units of account or as media of exchange. Alternative monetary standards might then arise in the marketplace to operate in...

Although few academic economists today endorse a gold standard, historical data show that actual gold standards have outperformed actual fiat standards in at least five respects: (1) lower mean inflation rate, hence lower deadweight cost of economizing on money balances; (2) lower price level...

Although it is sometimes considered one of a kind, or a first-mover monopolist in the market for cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is surrounded by effective competitors. Between March 2013 and December 2014, while the market capitalization of Bitcoin grew four-fold, the market cap of other...

I describe and defend the dollarization of Ecuador in 1999-2000 as a bottom-up phenomenon, an expression of consumer sovereignty by money-users, to which the government finally conceded. From that perspective I rebut common top-down (social planner) arguments against dollarization, and criticize...

We revisit the origins of the Great Depression by contrasting the accounts of two contemporary economists, Friedrich A. Hayek and Gustav Cassel. Their distinct theories highlight important, but often unacknowledged, differences between the international depression and the Great Depression in the...

The most sophisticated monetary and banking policy advice available in the decades after 1776was found in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith recommended free competition amongnationwide banks of issue with only minimal legal restrictions and no legal privileges. Yetneither Alexander...

The presidential primary contests of 2011–12 brought renewed attention to the idea of reinstituting a gold standard. The 2012 Republican Party platform ultimately included a plank calling for the creation of a commission to study the issue.The favorable attention given to the idea of...