A Free-Market Monetary System and The Pretense of Knowledge

Friedrich A. Hayek

Here are two of Hayek’s greatest essays in one volume.

The book begins with Hayek’s most excellent essay on money. It is also his most radical. He plainly says that central banks cannot be reformed. There can never be sound money so long as they are in charge. He calls for their complete abolition, no compromises accepted. He wants the market in charge of money from top to bottom.

His words predicting crisis followed by wild swings in valuation are up to the minute. He also relates the quality of money with the recurrence of crisis, showing an excellent application of Austrian theory.

Hayek was deeply influenced by Mises, and this shows here in the area of money.

The second essay is “The Pretense of Knowledge,” his shocking Nobel speech that explained why the very idea of government in our times is unintellectual, presumptuous, and untenable. He is as critical of socialism as he is of interventionism. He shows that the state is not capable of doing all that it is charged with doing, and why conceding it any role in social and economic management is dangerous to liberty.

It was not the speech everyone expected. But it lived up to Hayek’s lifelong commitment to telling truth to power.

A Free-Market Monetary System by F. A. Hayek

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Meet the Author
F A Hayek
Friedrich A. Hayek

F. A. Hayek (1899–1992) is undoubtedly the most eminent of the modern Austrian economists, and a founding board member of the Mises Institute. Student of Friedrich von Wieser, protégé and colleague of Ludwig von Mises, and foremost representative of an outstanding generation of Austrian School theorists, Hayek was more successful than anyone else in spreading Austrian ideas throughout the English-speaking world. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with ideological rival Gunnar Myrdal ”for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.”  Among mainstream economists, he is mainly known for his popular The Road to Serfdom  (1944).

Mises Daily Friedrich A. Hayek
When one studies the history of money, one cannot help wondering why people should have put up for so long with governments exercising an exclusive power over 2,000 years that was regularly used to...
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References

Mises Institute, 2009