The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar

Murray Rothbard’s classic short book on money, first published in 1962 and carrying his 1991 preface. Rothbard argues that the “dollar” was never a thing in itself but a name for a weight of gold, and that the long drift from weight to name—beginning with the government monopoly of the mint and ending in 1933—was a chain of interventions rather than a single wicked act. He breaks with fellow gold advocates by holding that fractional-reserve banking is not merely unstable but fraudulent: a bank note is a warehouse receipt, and issuing more receipts than gold is legalized counterfeiting. The remedy is a 100 percent gold dollar. Rothbard answers the standard objections, places the program in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian tradition, and maps the transition.