The Inflation Crisis, and How to Resolve It

Preface

This book was first planned as a revised edition of my What You Should Know About Inflation, first published in 1960. But inflation, not only in the United States but throughout the world, has since then not only continued, but spread and accelerated. The problems it presents, in a score of aspects, have become increasingly grave and urgent, and have called for a wider and deeper analysis.

Therefore this is, in effect, an entirely new book. Only about one-seventh of the material has been taken from the 1960 volume, and even this is revised. The other six-sevenths is new. In order to make the distinction clear for those who may have read the former book, I have divided this volume into two parts. All the material from the older book is included in part one, “Overall View.” This does not mean that all of part one appeared there. Chapter 2, for example, presents a forty-year record of inflation instead of the twenty-year record in the previous volume. All of part two, “Close-Ups,” is new material. Some of the chapters in this book have appeared in slightly different form as articles in the Freeman, though they were written originally for this volume.

What You Should Know About Inflation was essentially a primer. This new volume is more ambitious. In it I have attempted to analyze thoroughly and in depth nearly a score of major problems raised by inflation and chronic fallacies that are in large part re-sponsible for its continuance. So the two parts supplement each other: as suggested by their titles, the first gives an overall view and the second is a series of detailed and close-up examinations.

Because I have taken up these problems and fallacies in separate chapters, and tried to make the discussion of each complete in itself, there is necessarily some repetition. When we take a comprehensive view of each subsidiary problem, we necessarily meet considera-tions which each shares with the overall problem. Only by this repeated emphasis and varied iteration of certain truths can we hope to make headway against the stubborn sophistries and falsehoods that have led to the persistence of inflationary policies over nearly half a century.

HENRY HAZLITT

February 1978