I awoke early this morning to a pleasant surprise from our boy Stephan Livera in Sydney; a podcast interview with Austrian economist Jörge Guido Hülsmann and a recommendation to peep this Hans-Hermann Hoppe essay. I haven't had the time to sit down and listen to the whole interview yet, but I tore through the essay, How is Fiat Money Possible? - Or the Devolution of Money and Credit, this morning and highly recommend you freaks check it out if you get a chance at some point in the near future.

In just 26 pages, Hoppe does an incredible job of describing the path from which fiat money comes to be, why a monopoly on money production is a detriment to society, and why the current form of currency barter makes the global economy inefficient.

If anything, this essay is something worth reading IMO because it very lucidly explains the contrasts between sound commodity-based money and fiat money. If any of you freaks are partial towards Milton Friedman and his theory of freely floating "national monies" be warned, Hoppe comes at his ideas with very sound logic.

Beyond this, Hoppe gives pretty convincing arguments against some of the Austrian Free Banking advocates, George Selgin and Lawrence White and their ideas of fractionally reserved banks that use commodity monies as reserves.

It is imperative to question the mainstream narrative IMO. This essay comes at the heart of the most pervasive mainstream economic theories that currently run our world. I will go even further and say that it imperative that we seriously consider the ideas laid out by Hoppe and Hülsmann TODAY because we finally can attempt to apply them via Bitcoin. The ability to test these theories with gold was neutered decades ago and only with the emergence of Bitcoin have we found a practical way to implement a sound monetary system.

The best part? We don't have to ask permission to test out these ideas. The shackles of monopolistic monetary systems run by governments and "apolitical" central banks have been destroyed with the code and distributed organization that is the Bitcoin network. Now we will see if these monopolies of money production can compete on the open market. I'm very skeptical.

Final thought...

Believe it or not, Hurricane 40s were the beverage of choice for a stretch in high school. I just gagged a bit thinking about it.