Professor Heilperin was the outstanding monetary theorist before and after the Second World War who explained the inflation dangers associated with monetary nationalism, and called for a new international monetary system based on gold: not a gold exchange standard but a genuine gold standard.
Even while the Keynesians and monetarists were predicting nirvana flowing from paper money, the Austrians saw the looming disaster.
These are his critical essays that appeared between the early 1930s and the mid 1960s, and provide an excellent overview of his thought. This book, out of print since 1968, provides an outstanding presentation of the Austrian perspective.
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Michael Heilperin was born in 1909 in Warsaw, Poland. He was a friend and colleague of Ludwig von Mises’s in Geneva, and his specialization was the international monetary system. He applied the Austrian theory of the business cycle along with his knowledge of the balance of payments to warn against the rise of monetary nationalism. See his literature archive.
The collectivistic and neomercantilistic writers of today seek prosperity along a road that necessarily takes us further and further away from peace.
The rulers of that period had far-reaching powers over the activities of their subjects, while individual liberties were largely submerged.
Obviously the word [mercantilism] can only be used within strict limitations, but, alien as the conception of a national economy still was to the governments of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, it is plain from their conduct that they desired to protect the industry and commerce of their subjects against foreign competition, and even, here and there, to introduce new forms of activity into their countries.
Mises Institute, 2007
