Juan de Mariana, De monetæ mutatione (1609)

The thirteen-chapter treatise in which a Jesuit historian argued that debasing the coinage is a tax levied without consent, and therefore theft; that money has two values which a well-ordered commonwealth must keep equal; and that prices rise by as much as is taken out of the coin. He argued it from Castilian statute and from a price history of four earlier debasements, refused the same reasoning's application to the American silver, and printed the case against himself in his own chapter IX.