[This article is excerpted from chapter 7 of What Has Government Done to Our Money? ]

The idea of private coinage seems so strange today that it is worth examining carefully. We are used to thinking of coinage as a “necessity of sovereignty.” Yet, after all, we are not wedded to a “royal prerogative,” and it is the American concept that sovereignty rests, not in government, but in the people.

Arthur Travers-Borgstroem, a Finnish writer, published a book entitled Mutualism that deals with ideas of social reform, and culminates in a plea for the nationalization of credit. A German edition appeared in 1923. In 1917, the author had established a foundation under his name in Berne, Switzerland, whose primary objective was the conferring of prizes for writings on the nationalization of credit. The panel of judges consisted of Professors Diehl, Weyermann, Milhaud, and Reichesberg, the bankers Milliet, Somary, Kurz, and others.

Or so we read in the Washington Post. Austrian business cycle theory is studiously avoided, of course, and “animal spirits” are back.

We get one paragraph about the Japanese stagnation of the 1990s, but no acknowledgment at all that none of the Keynesian tools accomplished a thing.

Have at this one, commenters.

Every monetary crisis in US history has given rise to a movement of money crankism, which is this strange combination of good and often accurate descriptions of the problem with the money and banking system, with only small but very critical inaccuracies, combined with a populist resentment against bankers complete with phony quotes from the usual suspects, a below-the-surface anti-semitism, followed by a head-long plunge into the full-scale wackiness of advocating government-printed “debt-free” money – a system guaranteed to remove every check on credit expansion and one far worse than the

To illustrate one of the pernicious effects of socialism to my classes, I will often ask students what would happen if I decided to minimize failure by taking away points from the A students and give them to the F students. What happens to the incentives faced by hard-working students who get good grades? What lessons are learned by the stereotypical lazy student who customarily just gets by in school? Also, what would likely happen to the overall class performance, over time, when such a grading policy is in place?

Today is “Blog Action Day;” here’s an apparent mission statement from the official website:

“Today thousands of bloggers will unite to discuss a single issue–poverty. We aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web!”

I’ve been telling people for weeks that economists are the wet blankets of the world, so keeping this in mind I thought I would offer a few ideas about what we can do to reduce poverty around the world.

Letters in the New York Times are becoming increasing nutty:

What a shame that the words and concepts of nationalization and socialism are anathemas in the American vocabulary. It’s too bad, because they often work quite well.

In reality, large swaths of the American economy are nationalized. For the most part, it works.

Health care for the elderly is in the national domain with Medicare.

Retirement and disability pensions are nationalized with Social Security.