Gold: Not the Giant State Killer
"State-controlled money is immoral, dangerous and impoverishing. It paves the way for government theft of private wealth through the inflation tax, and thus allows the state to do more of what it does best: wage wars, kill, imprison, steal and enrich the friends of the regime at the expense of everyone else. Privatizing the monetary system and imposing a 'separation of money and state' would help limit these activities."
"[But] states long predate the money monopolies they now enjoy. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – without the benefit of fiat currencies – states created enormous standing armies for the first time. They established mercantilist economies. Many rulers managed to assemble large bureaucracies to serve absolutist states. States were centralized to a degree that had not been seen in Western Europe since the Romans. It was a period of enormous gains in state building for princes and their agents."Yet these states could not 'print money' nor enjoy the benefits of fiat money except in very short-lived and limited cases. Indeed, this period of immense state growth was also a period of 'concurrent' and 'parallel' currencies during which a wide variety of gold and silver coins – most of them foreign – competed within the borders of a single state. Many efforts by regimes to issue questionable, debased money failed because there were so many alternatives. But this didn't stop, say, Louis XIV from hammering together a powerful state."So when we ask ourselves the question 'Can states survive without fiat currency?' the answer is clearly, 'All experience points to yes'."
"Some advocates of cryptocurrencies have nonetheless attempted to claim that when the financial system is decentralized through crypto networks states will somehow be unable to tax. This would work if resources took no form other than money. But that's not the case. Since human beings are physical beings – with needs for food, water, shelter, heating and more – the state need only concentrate on taxing and monitoring physical goods. This would certainly shift the tax burden from the financial sector to physical assets, but it wouldn't end the ability to tax."Rather, if states find themselves with less access to the monetized economy, states will instead increase taxes on real estate, retail trade, fuel and hard-to-move physical capital. These states could even require that these payments be made in the state's preferred money, thus ensuring the continuation of state-controlled money, even if that money is a less preferred money within a competitive framework."
"Those who refuse to comply would see their assets confiscated at the point of a state-wielded gun."