The crisis of 2008 has led to a revival of interest in the Austrian School’s theory of the business cycle. Why? Because several Austrian School economists and newsletter writers warned of the looming crisis. They did so two years before it hit. These predictions were dismissed as radical and out of touch. The most widely viewed debate over this matter – after the fact – took place on CNBC in 2006. Peter Schiff warned of the recession.   The rival views insist that the free market is insufficient to provide a reliable monetary system. Either the national government or the nation’s central bank must intervene in the free market in order to provide stability and reliability to the money system and therefore to the economy.  The logical extension of this outlook is that there is a great need for a world government and a world central bank, which together provide such stability internationally. Most economists and politicians refuse to say this in public, but this is a matter of prudence, not logic.  In contrast, the Austrians say that the free market can provide such a system of world money. We have already seen this system in operation. It was called the gold standard. It operated for most of the nineteenth century. It needed no world government and no world central bank to make it work. It did not need trained economists to make it work. You can imagine how popular Austrian School economics is with economists – about as popular as the gold standard.  The non-Austrians insist that money needs government coercion in order to be money. Money may have started without coercion, but this condition cannot last for long, nor did it. The defenders of this position rarely come out and explain why, in terms of their theory of markets; money is different from other goods and services. If private property and the right of exchange produce efficient markets for other scarce resources, why not for money? They do not say, exactly. They just insist that this is the case.  Article by Gary North (link:  http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north784.html)