The archive.

The American "money question" runs from Civil War greenbacks and Bryan's Cross of Gold to the Federal Reserve, and Reed's 1982 essay revives it with a radical claim: money must be divorced from politics and returned to the market. He builds on Carl Menger's account of money as an emergent product of exchange rather than a state invention, arising as traders seek a widely marketable medium to escape the limits of barter. Precious metals prevailed through durability, divisibility, and stability; paper began as a redeemable substitute before political privilege turned it into unbacked fiat. Against reforms that leave the state monopoly intact, Reed insists the framework of thought must change first, likening faith in managed money to obsolete superstition and modest fixes to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Monetary history records no instance of a people voluntarily choosing in the marketplace to use unbacked fiat paper as their money!

Wilderness is best protected, this 1988 essay from The Freeman contends, not by the state but by owners and donors whose incentives make conservation outlast the electoral cycle. Public land, Reed argues, can become no one's land, while private title fixes a decision in place. Eight cases carry the claim: The Nature Conservancy quietly buying habitat rather than lobbying Congress, the Audubon society permitting monitored oil and gas drilling on its Rainey Sanctuary without measurable harm, a for-profit sea-lion cave that preserves a rookery once thinned by a state bounty, a Utah cattle ranch made compatible with elk and cutthroat trout, and Conservation International's Bolivian debt-for-nature swap. The examples are selective and polemically arranged, but the conceptual move is plain: conservation reframed as a question of institutions that make care accountable.

The truth is that many of the very best examples of environmental preservation are the products of private groups and private property.