… is from pages 419-420 of the revised (1993) edition of Richard Timberlake’s landmark study Monetary Policy in the United States; it occurs immediately after he suggests how the role of private, competitively issued money might be expanded:
Clearly, the institutional changes I have suggested are technically simple and would not unduly disturb the present-day payments system. Indeed, any one or more of these changes could be put in place without a ripple. Yet at the moment they are politically impossible. Popular sentiment has become conditioned to the rule of men and women in monetary policy, no matter the evidence that documents its failure. So the case rests: Until the government’s monopoly over money is abolished, good private competitive enterprise money will never have the chance to drive out bad governmental monopoly money.
