The Role of the Courts and Judges (notes taken by Bettina B. Greaves during the Mises Seminar in New York in the 1960s):
"The market, the real social institution, the fundamental social institution, has one terrific weakness. The weakness is not in the institution of the market but in the human beings who are operating on the market. There are people who do not want to comply with the fundamental principle of the market — voluntary agreement and action according to voluntary agreement. There are people who resort to violence. And there are people who do not comply with the obligations which they have voluntarily accepted in agreement with other people. The market, the fundamental human social institution cannot exist if there is not an institution that protects it against those people who either resort to violence or who are not prepared to comply with the obligations which they have voluntarily accepted. This institution is the state, the police power of the state, the power to resort to violence in order to prevent other people, ordinary men, from resorting to violence.(...)
If a judge were to say that whatever the government calls a horse is whatever the government calls a horse, and that the government has the right to call a chicken a horse, everybody would consider him either corrupt or insane. Yet in the course of a very long evolution, the government has converted the situation that the government must settle disputes concerning the meaning of "money" as referred to in contracts, into another situation. Over centuries many governments and many theories of law have brought about the doctrine that money, one side of most exchange agreements, is whatever the government calls money. The governments are pretending to have the right to do what this doctrine tells them, that is to declare anything, even a piece of paper, "money." And this is the root of the monetary problem."
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