Nothing Inherent in Goods

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:30:00 +0200

Between the eighth and the seventeenth of March 1892 a commission sat in Vienna to decide what the money of Austria-Hungary should be made of. Its most eminent member was a fifty-two-year-old professor of political economy who had spent the previous decade in an academic war and the previous year preparing for this question. His evidence, Friedrich Hayek wrote in 1934, “attracted the widest attention” and “even achieved what, for an economist, was perhaps the unique distinction of causing a temporary slump on the stock exchange”¹. On 2 August the empire created the gold crown by law; the new currency came into force nine days later and lasted until the end of 1924².

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Nothing Inherent in Goods