I am becoming increasingly convinced that the obsession with sound money among Austrian econ types is just a cope to avoid having to talk about the role of usury in our financial enslavement.
Discussion
Granted it's something of a loaded topic but that in itself seems to have become a distraction from the actual point.
It certainly creates "fragility", in Nicholas Nassim Taleb's sense of the term.
The fractional-reserve scam magnifies this beyond recognition, of course.
Fractional reserve banking and compound interest are the twin evils of our financial system but, while you need to move away from sound money to enable such criminality, the problem is primarily one of human corruption rather than the money supply so weeding it out will sadly require something a good deal more ruthless than libertarianism.
Thats certainly one approach, but I feel people greatly underestimate how much large-scale criminality depends on the State for collection.
I think local courts (howsoever constituted) should apply the Common Law maxim "ex turpi causa non oritur actio" (from a disgraceful cause no legal action shall arise") and reject plaintiffs seeking to recover debts owed for gambling, usury or fractional reserve lending.
This wouldn't abolish such vices, of course, but it would render such businesses small, clandestine and unpopular.
Good point - it certainly depends on some form of cartel which holds a monopoly on violence. This is why I tend toward distributism and subsidiarity economically and monarchy politically.
A monarch needs gravitas, so I won't support any claimant smaller than a mountain range.
Small monarchs accumulate favourites and flatterers.
I was always taken with Tolkein's description of a monarch who spent his days fussing over his collection of fine ceramics and serves no other purpose but to occupy the role of sovereign and prevent other, darker forces from assuming it. I'm not sure how that would play out these days now that we have the surveillance state, but Europe seemed to be onto something in the high middle ages, during that brief period between the end of feudalism and the beginnings of humanism.
Ludwig II Wittelsbach is my favourite of that era.
But really, it sucked. Bureaucratic/Military oligarchy with a royal figurehead.
Original-flavour feudalism was better.
Ludwig was very much at the tail end, and possibly even the last gasp of that system. Still, props to the man for his castles and for paying Wagner's bills.