Mises Daily

Bernanke has overseen the most expansionist monetary regime in American history.

Indeed, if this book, rather than Keynes's General Theory, had been the point of departure for subsequent study of macroeconomic fluctuations, the world almost certainly would have been a much, much happier place.

Although Mises's books were often criticized severely when they appeared, his analyses of market operations, money, inflation, government intervention, and Communism, all firmly based on human action principles, live on and are gaining increasingly serious attention from scholars.

"Alain de Botton is not an economist by training, but he clearly understands the division of labor (he even uses the term!) and is a keen observer of human action and the human condition."

Rothbard has in addition a carefully worked out theory, Austrian economics, to guide him.

In order to keep up the appearances of prosperity, government spending must be constantly increased, with an ever-increasing share of total production going to the nonproductive.

It is a betrayal of our duty to our patient to use any consideration of some greater social good defined by the government to alter the best course of action for the patient.

But the mere desire to be free has never saved any people who did not know and establish the things on which freedom depends — and these are the things of religion.

In the period from 1913 to 2007, the Fed — implementing its mission to "stabilize the price level" — destroyed over 97 percent of the purchasing power of the dollar. (For comparison's sake, note that the value of the dollar had increased slightly during the 100 years before the Fed was created.)

Right now, the libertarian forces seem to be in full retreat, and West Germany is advancing to familiar ground — to socialism.