James M. Buchanan (Nobel Laureate, economics, 1986) on reform of the monetary regime through constitutional 100% reserves:
The market will not work effectively with monetary anarchy. Politicization is not an effective alternative. We must commence meaningful dialogue with acceptance of these elementary verities. Far too much has been said and written in elaboration of the first statement, which too often is taken to be equivalent to the assertion that “capitalism” or “the market” has failed. Admittedly claims for market efficacy without qualifiers can be found. But economists should know that anarchy can only generate disorder rather than its opposite.
Later:
It follows that there is no economic reason why any money system, in an idealized setting, would allow for leverage at any level. No holder of a unit of money, as an entry in a balance sheet, should be authorized to lend more than the face value of this unit, quite independent of probabilistically determined expectations concerning potential redemptions.
Why not? Because to allow separate banks to create short-term liabilities to a multiple of the base money on the asset side of the account removes from the issuing authority some of the control of the aggregate amount of that value treated as money in the economy without offsetting benefits, thereby making the financial structure vulnerable to unpredictable shifts among instruments, which, in turn, generate changes in real values.
The modern dilemma is that we are left with a massive resource-using, financial- banking structure that has a functional purpose quite different from that which is widely accepted. The system in existence emerged from a historical process, the characteristics of which were partially appropriate for a monetary standard defined in terms of some commodity base, but which, ultimately, make no sense under a fiat system.
Finally:
Let us not waste this set of crises by exclusive recourse to jerry-built efforts to patch up the failed monetary anarchy we have witnessed.
Read more: http://www.mps2009.org/files/Buchanan.pdf
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