April 25, 2026
Honest money is here understood as a widely-accepted medium of exchange that arises solely from voluntary market exchanges and maintains its value solely from voluntary market exchanges. Since we live in a world dominated by states, honest money should also possess some feature that obstructs "the government's propensity to meddle with the currency system," as Mises wrote long ago.
People once settled on gold and silver coins as their preferred money, but we have long since been prohibited from using them. An employer who pays his employees by mutual consent in gold or silver coins is subject to prosecution from the guilty-until-proven-innocent IRS.
It would take a powerful criminal organization to prevent a nation of 349 million people from exercising their freedom to choose their own money, but that's what has happened. Ironically, most people don't consider this organization as criminal at all, but rather as necessary for the preservation and growth of civilization.
This testifies to the power of government propaganda and their subjects' ignorance and complicity.
Honest money imposes limits on government, but governments don't like limits so they take charge of the money their people use - for their own good, of course. This means monopolizing the supply while jailing others caught competing with them.
The purpose of controlling the supply is to ensure it supports government growth and to bail out the state's allies when they get in trouble. Paper and digital money make this a breeze when honest money is outlawed. Gold, as Guido Hülsmann wrote in his masterpiece, has a built-in insurance policy against this racket.
The population that goes along with this scheme has been groomed to accept it. Government's teachers repeat what they're told, and they're told the gold standard brought the world economy to its knees in the 1930s until gold was outlawed domestically as money. It was assumed that a "superstitious fetish for the yellow metal [prolonged] the Great Depression," Robert P. Murphy writes in a critique of this position.
With money thereafter easily inflatable, government had the resources to employ economists who would rebut skeptics, confuse the public, and support government spending policies. The population has become attached to its policies through social programs and foreign adventures where American troops save American families from whoever lives over there.
The government-created central bank has, as expected, proven invaluable in building a virtually opaque wall around its policies, providing a quid pro quo with its co-conspirator. If Keynes said one thing that was true, it was his comment about inflation disrupting capitalism so much that "the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery," a process that is incomprehensible to most people.
And not only incomprehensible, but of no interest to them, either, since they've heard that government spews free lunches simply by voting for the right politicians. As Gary North has written,
The public doesn't know, and the public doesn't care. This is a fundamental political fact: you must not expect the public to reform the system. The public knows nothing about the system. The public doesn't understand the system. The public can barely function during the day. People get used to keeping themselves going, week to week, or even day to day, and we should not expect much more than this from the average guy in the street. He knows how much money he's going to need to pay his bills at the end of the month, which means he's smarter than Congress. But the best you can hope for is that he is going to pay his bills at the end of the month.
Today we are so far from the idea of honest money that it's difficult to discuss the term publicly. "What's dishonest about the US dollar?" one might ask, forgetting or not knowing that inflation is a technique of defrauding dollar holders by reducing its buying power, and that before being saddled with a monopoly counterfeiter in 1913, the US economy experienced near-record productivity from 1870-1900 while experiencing dollar deflation. Unlike today, people got richer simply by hanging on to their cash.
The government's inflation calculator conveniently begins at 1913, but fortunately, there are other inflation calculators such as Tom's that show the purchasing power of the monetary unit as far back as 1665. Here are some results I found using the Consumer Price Index (Urban), 1665-2100:
$100.00 in 1800 dollars is: $48.90 in 1900 dollars. (The dollar gained in value by approximately 104%.)
$100.00 in 1900 dollars is: $2,065.49 in 2000 dollars. (The dollar lost in value by approximately 95.2%.)
Higher consumer prices are not attractive to most consumers because higher prices tend to impoverish them. Yet we've been saddled with a system the purpose of which is to generate higher prices - inflation. On the one hand the Fed says its policy is to move the economy toward "stable prices." Turning to the other hand, it says it achieves "stability" by aiming for "a 2 percent annual inflation rate across a wide range of goods and services."
To the Fed, stability means a gradual increase in the CPI. On a free market, one not obstructed by government-Fed meddling, prices tend to decline as productivity increases. In today's world, such "instability" cannot be tolerated.
Conclusion
Government has countless dependents, both foreign and domestic. And in this era of empire, few people will tolerate a decline in military spending. No one's going to rock the boat and pass judgment on its monetary piracy. No one, that is, except a few radicals who publish something like this.