It so happens that the Austrian Scholars Conference this year takes place in the midst of one of the most spectacular attempts to reflate the economy ever undertaken in American history. Ben Bernanke might as well be bombing Wall Street with silos full of cash.
What we see here is different in degree but not in kind to what has been attempted many times in American history, and also around the world.
Some books on the topic include Murray Rothbard’s marvelous History of Money and Banking in the United States. Rothbard traces inflations, banking panics, and money meltdowns from the Colonial Period through the mid-20th century to show how government’s systematic war on sound money is the hidden force behind nearly all major economic calamities in American history. Never has the story of money and banking been told with such rhetorical power and theoretical vigor.
In some ways, this book is the successor to the newly re-printed masterwork by William Gouge: A Short History of Money and Banking. The book was written in 1833, and it was a major blast against the trend towards inflation and paper money. He was an economist, journalist, and Treasury official, and, most of all, the leading champion of sound money in his day, completely dedicated to liberty hard money in a way that would classify him among the Austrians.
Another exclusive to the Mises story is the Phillips, McManus, and Nelson classic on the Great Depression: Banking and the Business Cycle. This rare treatise appeared in 1937 as an Austrian-style analysis of the stock market crash and the great depression that followed.
The history of banking by William Graham Sumner has been beloved by serious banking historians, but has only recently been reprinted: A History of American Currency. The goal of this book is to show that there is nothing good to come out of any paper money experiment, and that sound money is the only answer in a free society.
Charles Holt Carroll defended sound money in a blazing series of essays appearing in the latter decades of the 19th century. They are collected in the book. Here we discover his steadfast devotion to hard money and his unwavering rejection of fractional reserve banking in all its forms.
Now, let’s talk about how Bernanke’s tactics can actually result in the demolition of society itself. Two case studies: one of France and one of Germany. The first is Fiat Money Inflation in France by Andrew Dickson White. This study was first written in 1896, and it has not been surpassed, and nor has its power been diminished. The second is The Economics of Inflation by Costantino Bresciani-Turroni. “This is the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the great German inflation from 1914 to 1923,” wrote Henry Hazlitt.
Hazlitt himself wrote a small primer on inflation that really holds up well: What You Should Know about Inflation. He presents the Austrian theory of money in the clearest possible terms, and contrasts it with the fallacies of government management. He takes on not only the Keynesians but also the monetarists, as well as anyone who believes that government debt accumulation and manipulation of interest rates are harmless.
Finally, no list would be complete without the greatest book of them all: Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit. Mises wrote this book for the ages, and it remains the most spirited, thorough, and scientifically rigorous treatise on money to ever appear. It made his reputation across Europe and established him as the most important economist of his age.
We need to drop a silo of these books on the Fed!
