Scotland (1714-1844) Was Once a Country with a Stable Banking System: No Central Bank, No Legal Tender Laws, No Banking Regulations, No Monetary Policy, and No Restrictions on the Right to form a Bank and Issue Money

There once was a country with a stable banking system the envy of the rest of the world. While there's nothing so extraordinary in that, it was a system with aspects almost everyone would call—were it proposed to them—unworkable. Not only was there no central bank, there were no legal tender laws, no political banking regulations, no monetary policy, and no restrictions on the right of anyone to form a bank and issue his own money. The country was Scotland from 1714-1844. When English law put an effective end to this "free banking" regime, there were 19 different banks issuing their own notes.

--Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman, The Case for Gold: A Minority Report of the U.S. Gold Commission (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 147.