The True Gold Standard (Second Edition)
Copernicus: The Debasement of Money and the Fall of a State
The work of Sir Isaac Newton, as Master of the British Mint, in creating the classical gold standard is relatively well known. The work of an equally great scientist, Copernicus, who gave us the heliocentric model of the solar system, is less so. Leszek Zygner of Nicolaus Copernicus University, recently referenced in another entry here, provides substantial information on Copernicus's great contributions to monetary theory. These are by no means no less relevant today than are his breakthrough contributions to astronomy.
Copernicus wrote three versions of his treatise on the reform of Prussian coinage in the years 1517-26 which have survived in the form of copies and translations. As has been proved in the course of a thorough analysis of their contents, they are subsequent versions of the same work. The text of the first draft, usually referred to as Meditata, was written in Latin in 1517. This document was produced with Bishop Fabianus Lusianus and members of the cathedral chapter of Warmia in mind and was to support their arguments in debates on monetary reform held during assemblies of the Estates of Royal Prussia (Stany Prus Królewskich). The treatise consisted of two parts. In the first Copernicus discusses general issues related to the theory of money and formulates inter alia a law of bad money driving out good. In the second he focused on the current monetary situation in Royal Prussia and in particular on the decline in the value of Prussian coinage, enumerating its types and explaining the reasons for the decrease in value of individual coins. The second version, known from the 16th c. as Modus cudendi monetam (The Way to Strike Coin), was a German translation of the Meditata of 1517. This translation, incidentally abounding in oversimplifications and inaccuracies, was made in 1519 most probably as a document to be presented to the Prussian Assembly attended by the Polish King Sigismund I the Old (Zygmunt I Stary). Copernicus read the German version of his treatise before the Royal Prussian Assembly attended by King Sigismund Is envoys at Grudzi?dz (Graudenz) on 21 March 1522. Referring to the debate held before his speech, he concluded his presentation with a proposal to mint three Prussian szel?gi as an equivalent of one Polish grosz (groshen) and thus to equalize the value of the new Prussian coinage with that issued by the Crown. The third version of his treatise on money entitled Monete cudende ratio (On the Minting of Coin) survives in three copies and was most probably written before April 1526. This revised version partly based on the text of his 1517 paper, was complemented by a general theory of money with special emphasis placed on the debasement of money as one of the main reasons for the fall of a state. The gold standard, in short, has an unrivaled intellectual pedigree.
America recently celebrated — well, maybe we didn’t celebrate – the 80th anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt’s action to end to the gold standard. But America is also celebrating – well, maybe not everyone is celebrating – the 100th anniversary of the legislation creating the Federal Reserve System.
As Lewis E. Lehrman...
Constitution.org provides an extensive and thoughtful Memorandum of Law by Larry Becraft, Esq., of Huntsville, Alabama, on Article I, Section 10, clause 1 of the US Constitution.
Sir William Blackstone courtesy of Wikipedia
One of many interesting matters the Memorandum treats is Blackstone's Commentaries, a book that was a fixture in the...
In the spring of 1933, global trade was being undermined by nationalistic economic responses to the Great Depression, including currency...
Oct 05, 2012
Key Monetary Writings
Myth 2: The Gold Standard is an Example of Price-Fixing by Government
Barry Eichengreen (2011) writes that countries using gold as money “fix its price in domestic-currency terms (in the U.S. case,...
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Kathleen M. Packard, Publisher The Gold Standard Now
Board of Advisors: Senior Advisors Sean Fieler, James Grant, Senior European Advisor Advisors In Memoriam
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George Gilder, whose new book publishes today, is one of the original pillars of Supply Side economics. As stated by Discovery Institute, which he co-founded, “Mr. Gilder pioneered the formulation of supply-side economics when he served as Chairman of the Lehrman Institute’s Economic Roundtable, as Program Director for the Manhattan Institute….”
Lately we have been engulfed by headlines reporting financial turmoil on every continent, in almost every nation, large and small. The commissars of central planning who so marred the history of the 20th century have been replaced by central banks in the 21st. In Cyprus, the new leadership now dares to confiscate citizens’ wealth with a one-time tax of up to 60 percent on bank deposits above 100,000 euros. Self-interested prime ministers blame continental monetary policies for instigating the currency wars that they themselves surreptitiously carry on.