The Origins of Money

Written in the same year that he testified before the Currency Commission in Austria-Hungary, Carl Menger explains that it is not government edicts that create money but instead the marketplace. Individuals decide what the most marketable good is for use as a medium of exchange. "Man himself is the beginning and the end of every economy," Menger wrote, and so it is with deciding what is to be traded as money.

By Carl Menger
Introduction by Doug French