In Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s important article Banking, Nation States and International Politics: A Sociological Reconstruction of the Present Economic Order (published in 1990 in the Review of Austrian Economics; reprinted as Chapter 3 in his The Economics and Ethics of Private Property), he notes one possible end-result of the state monopolization of money and credit. He notes the then-imminent rise of the ECU/Euro, and then predicts what might happen next: the combination of the three dominant currencies (at the time, the US dollar, the Japanese yen, and the Euro) into a new one-world paper currency (which might be called the “Phoenix,” say) run by a US-dominated World Central Bank. (We might add in now the Chinese Yuan, too.) With all the talk of the need for “coordination” among central banks to deal with the current crisis, and the anti-capitalist regulations that are sure to come, maybe the Phoenix is about to rise.
An extended quote from Hoppe’s paper is below.
With the European calculational chaos solved, then [by the creation of the ECU/Euro], and in particular with the European hard currency countries neutralized and weakened within a cartel that by its very nature favors more against less inflationary countries so as to protect and prolong U.S. hegemony over Europe, little indeed would remain to be done. With essentially only three central banks and currencies and U.S. dominance over Europe and Japan, the most likely candidates to be chosen as a U.S-dominated World Central Bank are the IMF [International Monetary Fund] or the BIS [Bank for International Settlement]; and under its aegis then, initially defined as a basket of the dollar, the ECU, and the yen, the “phoenix” (or whatever else its name may be) will rise as a one-world paper currency–unless, that is, public opinion as the only constraint on government growth undergoes a substantial change and the public begins to understand the lesson explained in this book: that economic rationality as well as justice and morality demand a worldwide gold standard and free, 100-percent reserve banking as well as free markets worldwide; and that world government, a world central bank and a world paper currency–contrary to the deceptive impression of representing universal values–actually means the universalization and intensification of exploitation, counterfeiting-fraud and economic destruction.
