CIS attacks fiat paper money

An excellent article by Adam Creighton of the Centre for Independent Studies:

Fiat currency has been the biggest moral hazard of all time, encouraging governments to borrow and spend beyond their natural limits in full knowledge they could always repay their debts. After all, even the crazy French 1^st Republic repaid its debts: in worthless assignats.

Rampant money creation in the United States and Europe, politely known as ‘quantitative easing’, is having little impact on job creation. Unemployment still hovers above 9% on both sides of the Atlantic. But it will surely ease the debt burden of governments. As a 40-year-old Alan Greenspan wrote in 1966 (somewhat ironically given his later career): “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation."