No abstract

This article analyses the justifications for the creation of central bank digital currencies – CBDCs – and their anticipated features with the aim of looking at them from two different and somewhat opposing perspectives. These perspectives define the two broad historical and logical currents that emerged in the Banking School versus the Currency School debates. We are going to investigate to which extent can the concept of CBDC be embedded into the Banking School’s body of thought and to which extent can it be criticized with the arguments of the Currency School.

The present paper is a defense of the free-market economy/capitalism as a proper institutional setting for both producing and preserving cultural goods. We argue that culture is best served by a framework in which economic agents can evaluate their cultural consumption and production in a market order based on private property rights and monetary prices. In this vein, we first put, in contrast, two important lines of thought on the subject of value and capital in cultural matters. On the one hand, the mainstream approach upholds both that “cultural value” is intrinsic (and measurable) and that a fourth type of capital (namely “cultural capital”) can be introduced in the capital theory. On the other hand, by using a qualitative research methodology, based on deductive reasoning and historical analysis, we contrast the mainstream/neoclassic view with the praxeological approach of the Austrian School of economics. We conclude that neither “cultural value” is an objective fact, nor that the very concept of “cultural capital” can be integrated coherently in the economic theory. Yet, we claim that private management of cultural goods is superior to their public administration, due to (1) a genuine interest of private owners to rationally exploit cultural goods according to the subjective preferences of cultural consumers, (2) the inbuilt sustainability of the free-market economy as concerns the efficient exploitation of the cultural goods.

No part of these works may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism.