Menger and the origins of money

Lord Keynes at the Social Democracy blog has an interesting post on Carl Menger.called Menger on the Origin of Money.

As I point out in my comments, Lord Keynes is mistaken in trying to recruit Menger to the chartalist side of the metallist vs chartalist debate. Menger always was a pure metallist:

So while Menger believed that the state might adopt metals as money, it could not legislate into existence a worthless item as money. The state could construct a system of coinage and thereby perfect an existing metallic monetary system, but not create a system based on intrinsically worthless materials.

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