The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization by Saifedean Ammous

Part I

Fiat Money

Chapter 1

Introduction
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. government
closing the gold-exchange window and putting the world on a fiat
monetary system. The vast majority of people alive today have
never used anything but fiat money. This cannot be written off as
an unexplained fluke, and economists should be able to explain how this
system functions and survives, despite its many obvious flaws. Fiat’s
longevity makes it unreasonable to keep dismissing it as an irredeemable
fraud on the brink of collapse, as many of its detractors have done for
decades. There are, after all, plenty of markets around the world that are
massively distorted by government interventions, but they nonetheless
continue to survive. It is no endorsement of these interventions to attempt to
explain how they persist.
In his 1929 book The Thing, G. K. Chesterton tells the story of a man
who finds a fence that appears to serve no purpose and decides to remove it.
Another man counters, “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let
you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and
tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”1 Fifty
years after taking its final form, and more than a century after its genesis,
with a new competitor threatening to potentially remove it, an assessment
of the uses of the fiat system is now both possible and necessary.
While fiat has not won acceptance on the free market, and though its
failings and limitations are many, there is no denying that many fiat systems
have worked for large parts of the last century and facilitated an
unfathomably large number of trades all around the world. Its continued
operation makes understanding it useful, particularly as we still live in a
world that runs on fiat. Just because you may be done with fiat does not
mean that fiat is done with you! Understanding how the fiat standard works,
and how it frequently fails, is essential knowledge for being able to navigate
it.

The Fiat Standard: The Debt Slavery Alternative to Human Civilization by Saifedean Ammous