Milton Friedman’s best-known technical works are his Theory of the Consumption function (1957) and the Monetary History of the United States (with Anna Schwartz, 1963). But it is rarely mentioned that Friedman won the John Bates Clark Award (given by the AEA every two years to the best American economist under 40) in 1951, years before these works appeared.
The new edition of Road to Serfdom that we are now carrying is called the “definitive edition” because it includes referee reports on the book, and other materials. Here is a report on the pre-publication manuscript from Frank Knight (1943): “In sum, the book is an able piece of work, but limited in scope and somewhat one-sided in treatment. I doubt whether it would have a very wide market in this country, or would change the position of many readers.”
William Smart’s translation of Capital and Interest, available for the first time in more than half a century here.
[This article is excerpted from chapter 12 of The Betrayal of the American Right, now available in the bookstore.]
In the early ‘40s a group of prisoners were forced to participate in a secret counterfeiting project spearheaded by the Nazi SS called Operation Bernhard. The plan was to flood the British economy with fake bank notes with the goal of destroying the currency (i.e., inflation). A similar project was developed in parallel for the American dollar.
Quoting:
An eminent economist writes: ‘The spheres of rational action and economic action are... coincident. All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action.’ And what is the end of economic activity? One’s own pleasure. ‘Action based on reason,’ goes on Professor von Mises, ‘action therefore which is only to be understood by reason, knows only one end, the greatest pleasure of the acting individual.’
Blanshard adds in a footnote:
