Quotes About Fiat Money

“A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank.”

— Ron Paul

“Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure "fiat money"-mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be.”

— David Graeber

“Fiat-money! Let the State 'create' money, and make the poor rich, and free them from the bonds of the capitalists! How foolish to forego the opportunity of making everybody rich, and consequently happy, that the State's right to create money gives it! How wrong to forego it simply because this would run counter to the interests of the rich! How wicked of the economists to assert that it is not within the power of the State to create wealth by means of the printing press!- You statesmen want to build railways, and complain of the low state of the exchequer? Well, then, do not beg loans from the capitalists and anxiously calculate whether your railways will bring in enough to enable you to pay interest and amortization on your debt. Create money, and help yourselves.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“The collapse of an inflation policy carried to its extreme
as in the United States in 1781 and in France in 1796
does not destroy the monetary system, but only the credit money or fiat money of the State that has overestimated the effectiveness of its own policy. The collapse emancipates commerce from etatism and establishes metallic money again.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“When a country has substituted credit money or fiat money for metallic money, because the legal equating of the over-issued paper and the metallic money sets in motion the mechanism described by Gresham's Law, it is often asserted that the balance of payments determines the rate of exchange. But this also is a quite inadequate explanation. The rate of exchange is determined by the purchasing power possessed by a unit of each kind of money.”

— Ludwig Von Mises

“It is obviously no secret that I earn a lot of money. But it is also no secret that I give most of it away. I don't live a luxurious life. I drive a small second-hand Fiat. I don't have to worry about money, which is itself a privilege. But I never had any anxiety that I would lose my identity.”

— Henning Mankell

“The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.”

— Matt Taibbi

“Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.”

— Carroll Quigley

“Apart from medieval China, which invented both paper and printing centuries before the West, the world had never seen government paper money until the colonial government of Massachusetts emitted a fiat paper issue in 1690.”

— Murray Rothbard

“Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world. Fiat money in extremis is accepted by nobody. Gold is always accepted.”

— Alan Greenspan

“In the North, neither greenbacks, taxes, nor war bonds were enough to finance the war. So a national banking system was created to convert government bonds into fiat money, and the people lost over half of their monetary assets to the hidden tax of inflation. In the South, printing presses accomplished the same effect, and the monetary loss was total.”

— G. Edward Griffin

“In the North, the sale of government bonds was the one measure for raising funds that seemed to work. Even that, however, with the lure of compounded interest to be paid in gold at a future date, failed to raise more than about half the needed amount. So the Union faced a real dilemma. The only options remaining were (1) terminate the war or (2) print fiat money. For Lincoln and the Republicans who controlled Congress, the choice was never seriously in doubt.”

— G. Edward Griffin

“If it's not accepted that big government, fiat money, ignoring liberty, central economic planning, welfarism, and warfarism caused our crisis, we can expect a continuous and dangerous march toward corporatism and even fascism with even more loss of our liberties,”

— Ron Paul

“The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.”

— Adam Smith

“Gold, unlike all other commodities, is a currency ... and the major thrust in the demand for gold is not for jewelry. It's not for anything other than an escape from what is perceived to be a fiat money system, paper money, that seems to be deteriorating.”

— Alan Greenspan

“There have been unions based on gold or silver, but not on fiat money - money tempted to inflate - put out by politically independent entities.”

— Milton Friedman

“I want to make it clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that fiat money, once established on the ruins of gold, cannot then continue indefinitely on its own.”

— Murray Rothbard

“The history of fiat money is little more than a register of monetary follies and inflations. Our present age merely affords another entry in this dismal register.”

— Hans F. Sennholz

“Only the naive inflationist's could believe that government could enrich mankind through fiat money.”

— Ludwig Von Mises