Monetary Theory

"Whenever the central bank inflated itself into financial trouble, the government stood ready to allow it to suspend specie payments."

If the dictator invests more and thus curtails the means available for current consumption, the people must eat less and hold their tongues.

Unless Hugo Chavez's government suddenly ends spending and returns to a free market, the most likely conclusion to current events in Venezuela is a crisis of interventionism, as the bolívar collapses and the government finds it more and more difficult to fund itself.

"The Bank of England has been reduced to the position of a part of the machinery for the manufacturing of political money in any quantity that may be required."

Recorded at The Mises Circle in Manhattan, on May 22nd, 2010.

it is not possible to create something by printing money and redistributing real wealth. All that such policies produce is a further economic impoverishment.

"Mises's desideratum was thus not a 'neutral' money, or even a practical approximation of it; rather, it was the complete elimination of 'human influence' on the purchasing power of money."

A government which interferes with banking exposes itself to great danger of error, and such errors cost it popular confidence sooner than any others.

Men are always forced to choose between satisfaction in nearer and remoter periods of the future.

We suggest that loose fiscal and monetary policies have severely undermined the ability of the private sector to generate real wealth.