It's a nutter book, but is technically pretty sound. He made one valuable point, too. In their laudable zeal to dethrone gold, Keynes & Co. misread Knapp to insist that money was inherently statal. (Knapp himself pointed to the Hamburg mark banco as a counterexample of working private money.) Hayek showed that things like Libra/Diem *could* exist, unmoored from the state's monopoly of legitimate violence. (Note that Federal Reserve Banks--the operating arm of the Federal Reserve--only have a limited subset of the commercial bank powers of 1913.) Hayek went nutters in assuming that private competitive moneys were good things. But he was right--and Keynes was wrong--in assuming that such crazy things were possible.
Then I’m afraid Hayek was not a sensible person https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denationalization_of_Money
It's a nutter book, but is technically pretty sound. He made one valuable point, too. In their laudable zeal to dethrone gold, Keynes & Co. misread Knapp to insist that money was inherently statal. (Knapp himself pointed to the Hamburg mark banco as a counterexample of working private money.) Hayek showed that things like Libra/Diem *could* exist, unmoored from the state's monopoly of legitimate violence. (Note that Federal Reserve Banks--the operating arm of the Federal Reserve--only have a limited subset of the commercial bank powers of 1913.) Hayek went nutters in assuming that private competitive moneys were good things. But he was right--and Keynes was wrong--in assuming that such crazy things were possible.