Recently I have been working on a review of a recently published (2011) volume, The Empire of Credit: The Financial Revolution in Britain, Ireland, and America, 1688-1815 for The Journal of the History of Economic Thought. I found the volume interesting in a number of ways, but especially because it seemed to lend support to some of my ideas on why the state has historically played such a large role in the supply of money. When I first started to study economics, I was taught that money is a natural monopoly, the value of money being inevitably forced down by free competition to the value of the paper on which it was written. I believe that Milton Friedman used to make this argument (though, if I am not mistaken, he eventually stopped), and I think the argument can be found in writing in his Program for Monetary Stability…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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