This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Monetary reform is the credible commitment needed to get our fiscal house in order.

So says Cato Institute's senior fellow Jerry Odriskill.

We spoke at the Cato Institute's monetary conference held last week.

The problems that are occurring in the Eurozone right now, do they in some way vindicate the idea of competitive currencies the fact that that competitive

currencies are effectively helping to provide a discipline to the Eurozone countries that are having these big problems?

Well, I think they vindicate the people that were skeptical about the Euro as an enterprise a little more than a decade ago.

They were attempting to unify their currency,

but they had disparate fiscal policies and I think even more important they didn't

have labor mobility among the countries to the way we have in the United States. Our dollar works for our

country which is a little smaller than the European Union taken as a whole because

when things turn down in one part of the country and one state,

people, workers, migrate and they go to areas where business is better and while theoretically migration is possible, it's

possible in a legal sense, but for a variety of reasons it's not practical. There's the language barrier which is

actually less than it used to be, but there's all sorts of regulations and

restrictions on the practice of one's profession so that the doctors and lawyers can't

migrate from one EU country to the other in practice their profession. They even

put restrictions on things like plumbers.

So they don't have the flexibility needed to have a single currency.

Now, what is going on is I think rather than an argument so much as an argument for

competitive currencies is there is an argument for efficient financial markets which no longer can be fooled as readily or as easily

...