Abstract: Properly speaking, money and law are natural outgrowths of human society, evolving over time via the voluntary cooperation that lies at the heart of the social enterprise.  And as gold and the golden rule have for millennia formed the basis, respectively, of society’s money and law, they accordingly constitute the “twin pillars of civilization,” governing the social enterprise such that, in Mises’s words, “the human species has multiplied far beyond the margin of subsistence.”  It stands to reason, then, that if money and law are corrupted, the social enterprise will be corrupted as well.  And as this is precisely what the state has done, essentially toppling the twin pillars of civilization, it is necessary to understand what the state is, where it came from, and how it has systematically gone about corrupting money and law, and thus the social enterprise as a whole.  For only then can money and law be returned to their rightful owners, and only then can the state be put in its proper place.  Which is no place so far as the proper functioning of civil society is concerned.

Download Paper: “Gold, the Golden Rule, and Government: Civil Society and the End of the State”