Patrick Barron writes: 

Imagine you are a promising car mechanic who wants to open a new car repair shop. You would like to provide basic services to low-income citizens at affordable prices. You would charge a bare minimum for your labor, and you would buy used (but decent) replacement parts. This service would be great for people who just want to keep their cars running for a couple more years — nothing fancy, just bare functionality.

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just launched the Program on Monetary Policy under the direction of  Scott Sumner, Professor of Economics at Bentley University and editor of the influential blog The Money Illusion.

Originally, paper money was not regarded as money but merely as a representation of a commodity (namely, gold). Various paper certificates represented claims on gold stored with the banks. Holders of paper certificates could convert them into gold whenever they deemed necessary. Because people found it more convenient to use paper certificates to exchange for goods and services, these certificates came to be regarded as money.

Are you required to use dollars for all transactions in the United States? Sometimes, I receive submissions from columnists that suggest or even outright assert that it is illegal to use currencies other than the US dollar in the United States. This is not the case. Federal legal tender laws — by themselves — do not outlaw the use of foreign currencies in trade, nor does it make the use of the US dollar mandatory. Federal law does make the US dollar (namely, Federal Reserve notes) the preferred currency via government edict.

Greece is back in the headlines. This should surprise no one. It was naïve to think that Greeks would accept being debt slaves forever.

Despite all the rumblings that Greece will be forced to leave the Euro, there is in reality no mechanism by which EU countries can force a Eurozone member to exit the currency union. It really is all a bluff. This is a standard scare tactic used by governments to induce people to give up freedom for a little security.