Megan McArdle meet George Selgin

Megan McArdle, one of the original movers in the economic blogosphere and a bundle of intellectual curiosity and insight, has raised the question of private currencies.  She raises a rather standard criticism which is if private currencies are so desirable why don't we see their wide spread adoption.  One could read her criticism as being consistent with the criticisms some raised to Hayek's scheme for private currencies in the 1970s within Austrian circles, namely that issuing a private currency out of the blue would violate Mises's regression theorem.  But there has been a lot of research done since that time on free banking and the evolution of money (Megan --- take a look at Tyler Cowen and Randy Kroszner's Explorations in the New Monetary Economics, and yes that is Tyler before he became the blogging icon and NYT columnist he now is, and Randy before he rose to Fed fame).  Obviously, Larry White and George Selgin, the world's leading researchers on this topic, can address these issues better than anyone and they need to meet Megan and talk to her about free banking.

George, in fact, has written quite a bit on the history of private coinage.

Megan and George should get together for some intellectual gains from exchange.