Austrian Economics Overview

Recorded at the Mises Institute on July 6, 2005.

Recorded at Mises University 2004.

The Free Market 26, no. 7 (July 2005)

Recorded at the Mises Institute on 15 June 2005.

Recorded at Mises University 2004.

What's the best book on money ever written? That's an easy one: What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray N. Rothbard. The Mises Institute is bringing out a new edition, and uniting it with Rothbard's radical blueprint for monetary reform. You can help.

The mythology of gold really grew up with Keynes and the quantity theory. Here are six of those myths: the gold standard is unable to accommodate the needs of an growing economy; the quantity of money is arbitrarily determined; the gold standard is a government price fixing scheme; the gold standard subjects a country to alternating inflation and deflation; the gold standard requires high costs devoted to resources; and the gold standard results in high interest rates.

Friedman’s book, Monetary History of the United States, tried to show the depression was caused by a deflation of the money supply by the Fed. Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression was published the next year in 1963. Rothbard argued that the Fed was actively inflating the money supply.

The founder of the Chicago School, Frank Knight, was an avowed egalitarian. Rousseau was his influence. Jacobins believed in mass democracy and politics as the only way to implement their ideas. They hated aristocrats and religious leaders. Knight believed in progressive taxation. He wanted neocon social democracy.

The debate still continues. It is all about Mises’ initial article and then book on Socialism in 1922. He demonstrated the necessity of the price system and showed how subjective values were transformed into objective prices which could be used as meaningful cardinal numbers in economic calculation.