In this letter, I continue my analysis of Christine Desan’s chapter in Money and the Western Legal Tradition edited by Fox and Ernst. Last time, in “The King’s Shilling,” I corrected a mistake in her presentation of the operation of the free minting system, which wrongly described the trade that “made money” at the mint as involving a fee paid by the merchant to the mint in both nominal and intrinsic terms. In fact, as I showed, this trade is better characterized as a swap of intrinsic for nominal: the merchant gave up some silver, but ended up with a higher (rather than lower, as Desan’s example suggests) amount of money in nominal terms. While the technical operational details of the mint are interesting in their own right, it is perhaps less easy for the reader to see the implications for the current debates that probably brought them to this blog in the first place — and developing them would take me beyond the scope of what I hope to accomplish in this space.
The Stakeholder Myth: Part 1
Awaiting the longer treatment of Desan's manuscript!