Importantly, civil servants' careers are not advanced by being the creatures of individual ministers, but by the contribution they are deemed by their seniors to have made to the collective enterprise of government.

ECONOMIST: Rumour, tittle-tattle and gossip

The economic contribution of his essay is that it represents the thesis advanced by German economist Georg Friedrich Knapp in The State Theory of Money (1924), an expose advocating the Chartalist approach to monetary theory claiming that money must have no intrinsic value and strictly be used as tokens issued by the government, or fiat money.

FORBES: Bitcoin Obliterates 'The State Theory Of Money'