The Gold Standard: A Critique of Friedman, Mundell, Hayek, and Greenspan

This is an essay which takes as its jumping off point the free enterprise system. It then attempts to evaluate the contributions of four distinguished scholars to monetary theory in general, and to an evaluation of the gold standard in particular. I take for granted the general case for markets, competition, economic freedom. The four individuals mentioned in the title have been chosen because they are widely believed to be exemplars of this limited government, free market, political philosophy — and are also opponents of the gold standard. It is one of the pur poses of the present contribution to test that very proposition. To wit, it is an attempt to see how consistent with their other wise expressed principles of free enterpriseare their contributions to monetary theory.