Over at Public Discourse, Acton’s Samuel Gregg has just published a piece about the future of money. The issuance of money, he writes, is often associated with issues of national sovereignty, despite the fact that governments have long abused their monopoly of the money supply. Gregg argues, however, that the role played by mismanaged monetary policy in the 2008 financial crisis may well open up the opportunity to consider some truly radical options for how we supply money to the economy.

The scholar who most developed the concept of sovereignty in the modern era, Jean Bodin (1530-1596), identified the right to issue coinage as a key element of sovereignty. In our time, some of the most contentious debates surrounding the euro have concerned its diminution of the national sovereignty of EU member-states adopting this transnational currency.

But is a state monopoly of the money supply truly essential to sovereignty? When [Adam] Smith listed the “only three duties [which] according to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has to attend to,” he did not include the supply of money. It was not until 1914 that the United States legislated to mandate that only one bank would be privileged by the government to issue legal tender.

Read “Beyond Sovereignty: Money and its Future” on Public Discourse