The Pattern of Indirect Exchange

Tags: Austrian Economics Overview, Value and Exchange

08/21/2008 Robert P. Murphy

Direct exchange was limited. The pattern of indirect exchange led to the common medium of exchange: money. Maximization of psychic income always leads the seller of a good to seek the highest money price for it, and the buyer of a good to seek the lowest money price.

All human action uses scarce resources to attempt to arrive at the most highly valued of not-yet-attained ends.

An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 187-231 in the Scholar’s Edition of Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State.

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.