The Bezos

“Bezos Versus Bernanke” is the headline up on futureofcapitalism.com, issued by the founding managing editor of The New York Sun, Ira Stoll. He cites as the “latest news in the story of the fall of the fiat dollar” word that the online retailer Amazon.com is issuing “Amazon coins,” which, the futureofcapitalism.com reports, it is calling a “new virtual money” and we’re inclined to call the Bezos.Mr. Stoll quotes an Amazon.com press release as saying that “When Amazon Coins launches in the U.S. this May, Amazon will give customers tens of millions of dollars’ worth of free Amazon Coins to spend on developers’ apps on Kindle Fire in the Amazon Appstore. Amazon will also make it quick and easy for customers to buy additional Amazon Coins using their Amazon accounts.”The questions Mr. Stoll poses are these — “why would anyone want to store value, or transact, in ‘Amazon Coins’ issued by Amazon CEO Jeffrey Bezos rather than in the notes issued by the Federal Reserve chaired by Ben Bernanke? Could it be that Mr. Bezos will prove a wiser steward of his money supply than Chairman Bernanke?”“Skeptics may point out that the Amazon Coins aren’t backed by anything concrete, such as gold,” Mr. Stoll notes. “But then again, neither are Federal Reserve notes.” In other words, Mr. Stoll notes, Mr. Bezos “isn’t the only operator out there hawking ‘virtual’ currency.” Or, as the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education calls it, irredeemable, electronic, paper ticket-money.The introduction of the Bezos invites a new look at one of Congressman Ron Paul’s signature pieces of legislation, the Free Competition in Currency Act. The measure never made it into law, and Dr. Paul is now, in a loss for America, out of the Congress. If the measure had been law, the way would have been opened for the use of the Bezos more widely.What the measure would have done was end the legal tender status of the United States dollar and open the field to competition from all sorts of currencies. This was an idea, Mr. Stoll points out, that was advanced by Friedrich Hayek in his latter years in a monograph on what he called the “denationalization of money.”The Sun was the first newspaper to endorse the Free Competition in Currency Act. We didn’t have the Bezos, per se, in mind. But were the ideas of Hayek to go into law, what in this electronic age would prevent the Bezos from competing with the dollar? The Bezos could even be managed with an idea of maintaining its convertibility into gold. Had that been done, a one-dollar Bezos issued in 2001 would today have a value of more than six times a dollar. And you could no doubt buy it in “one-click.”

The Bezos

The Bezos

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