Who’s gonna make money in a libertarian society? Whoever wishes? Isn’t it unpractical to have lots of currencies (like today)? Doesn’t it cause instability?
People would just use gold and silver or other tangible goods.
The only way to force people to use fiat paper is with violence/government.
Think about it. Given the free choice, would you pick paper money (where people could steal from you via inflation) or would you pick gold or silver?
Gold, because it’s scarce. But gold is just a metal, and has no real value. Have you seen the cartoon “Money as Debt”?
Gold would also lose value if we happened to find a lot more gold. And if the amount of gold were constant, it would increase in value, and this woulld encourage people not to spend.
I think gold is advertised by those who own a lot of gold 
Redeemable coins and paper money.
lots of people subjectively value gold. in so far as it has no innate value, neither does anything else, so nothing could be better than gold on simply that ground.
Money as debt starts out good and ends up nonsense/
people dont need encouragement or disencouragement to spend since they are not driven by animal spirits. the rational mind is aware of the logic of trade and will take advantage to the degree that it comprehends there is advantage to be had. i dont see any problems with that.
Food does.
Only if you want to eat.
And “food” is an insanely broad category. The value of brussel sprouts is completely different to one person than to another (I don’t eat brussel sprouts at all), as is that of beef, etc. etc.
Multiple currencies is actually good for stability. In my opinion, it would probably be a mixture of different privately issued currencies with the prevelance and purchasing power of the competing notes varying by region.
no. it has qualities not values.
- Learn what money is.
- The market will decide.
- The central bank causes instability.
So the issuer could just put sa much money in his own pockets as he wanted?
And in the long run, would capitalism make the purchasing power of today’s poor nations catch up with western countries?
Well… yes, but he’d be a fool to do so.
I’m not sure what you mean by “purchasing power of today’s poor nations” nations don’t really have purchasing power. But yes, the wealthier the people are of one nation the easier it is for people of another nation to “catch up” as there is simply more capital to spread. Just look at how the U.S. caught up with western Europe, or how the Asian nations are rising. (Ignore all the massive imperialism though.)
No it doesn’t. All value is subjective.
Some people are poisoned by peanuts.
I mean the relative price levels between nations. Even if the standard of living is relatively high in both Sweden and Norway, the level of prices is a lot higher in Norway. I don’t understand this currency stuff…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index It “seeks to make exchange-rate theory a bit more digestible”.
ha!
It has to be a material or item that’s sufficiently scarce, hard to find, durable and divisible. Salt used to work great in Roman times because it was hard to get. Advancing mining techniques enabled the extraction of great quantities of salt, thus making it useless as a currency (inflation, really).
Currently silver seems to be scarcer and harder to find than gold, making it my favorite choice.
Gold may also be a good choice, until there is a feasible way to extract it out of seawater. This is true for all material currency. In the future we may have a decentralized, fully electronic currency (e.g. http://www.bitcoin.org/)
Yes and no. It’s certainly possible that an issuer could put as much money in his own pockets as he wanted to, but the important point to remember that what “we” need to do is to find the institutional arrangement that will create the correct incentives. This is the problem with Hayek’s idea of banking, that people accept money on faith and that’s it. Well, sure it’ll be in the long run interest of the issuer to build social capital and work on the reputation of his bank by not inflating, but it may well be possible that he values the present too highly and as such inflates like crazy and uses the money for his own purposes.