The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous

The other main school of government‐approved economic thought in our day and age is the Monetarist school, whose intellectual father is Milton Friedman. Monetarists are best understood as the battered wives of the Keynesians: they are there to provide a weak, watered‐down strawman version of a free market argument to create the illusion of a climate of intellectual debate, and to be constantly and comprehensively rebutted to safely prevent the intellectually curious from thinking of free markets seriously. The percentage of economists who are actually Monetarists is minuscule compared to Keynesians, but they are given far too much space to express their ideas as if there are two equal sides. Monetarists largely agree with Keynesians on the basic assumptions of the Keynesian models, but find elaborate and sophisticated mathematical quibbles with some conclusions of the model, which exceptions always lead them to dare to suggest a slightly reduced role for government in the macroeconomy, which immediately gets them dismissed as heartless evil capitalist scum who do not care about the poor.