sound-money
Most economics curricula treat the economy as a machine — inputs, outputs, levers to pull. If you have ever built anything with your hands or run a small business, you already know this is wrong. The economy is not a machine. It is millions of people making decisions with incomplete information, und
sound-money
We have spent the previous articles establishing what sound money is, why the current system fails to provide it, and how both cryptocurrency and CBDCs fit into the picture. The natural question that follows is the practical one: what do you actually do about it? You understand the theory. You see t
sound-money
Richard Cantillon was an Irish-French economist and banker who, in the 1730s, wrote what is arguably the first systematic treatise on economics. His *Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général*, published posthumously in 1755, contained an observation so straightforward that it should not have taken
sound-money
In 1976, Friedrich Hayek published a slim, radical book called *Denationalisation of Money*. His proposal was straightforward: let private entities issue their own currencies, and let the market decide which ones survive. The good money — stable, trustworthy, resistant to manipulation — would drive
sound-money
There is a pattern in how power responds to threats. It does not simply resist the new thing; it absorbs the language of the new thing, hollows out its meaning, and offers a version that looks similar but operates in the opposite direction. Central Bank Digital Currencies are the monetary expression
sound-money
The Federal Reserve's own educational materials state, plainly, that most money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks through the act of lending. Not by the mint. Not by the Treasury. By banks, when they issue loans. If that sentence surprises you, you are in good company; the mechani
sound-money
There is a tax that requires no legislation, no vote, no public debate. It is never itemized on a pay stub. It does not appear on a ballot. It is collected silently, continuously, from every person who holds dollars, and it falls hardest on those who can least afford it. We call it inflation, and we
sound-money
Saifedean Ammous opened the third chapter of *The Bitcoin Standard* with an observation that deserves to be stated plainly: gold did not become money because it is pretty. Gold became money because it is the hardest commodity to produce relative to its existing supply. The stock-to-flow ratio of gol
sound-money
In 1871, Carl Menger published *Principles of Economics* and offered an explanation for why money exists that required no king, no decree, and no central committee. Menger argued that money emerges spontaneously from trade — that individuals, acting in their own interest, gradually converge on the m
sound-money
We have spent centuries searching for money that governments cannot debase. Gold served that purpose for most of recorded history — not because anyone decreed it, but because its chemical properties made it costly to produce, easy to verify, and impossible to conjure from nothing. When we moved to p