The Mainstream View on Money Is Logically Incoherent

This book aims to show that the consensus is wrong. Today’s mainstream view on money is logically incoherent because it is in fundamental conflict with essential aspects of money and money’s role in a market economy. Even a carefully controlled elastic money system, that is, one that operates according to the best intentions and the best designs of today’s mainstream economists and that avoids any obvious policy errors, will not enhance economic stability. Instead, the ongoing injections of new money must systematically distort market signals and cause misuse of resources, mispricing of assets, and misallocation of capital. In fact, such a system is unsustainable in the long run. It is bound to generate larger and larger crises and is likely to end in total collapse.

--Detlev S. Schlichter, prologue to Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2014), 8-9.