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[This article is excerpted from The Mystery of Banking .] I. Money: Its Importance and Origins 1. The Importance of Money Today, money supply figures pervade the financial press. Every Friday, investors breathlessly watch for the latest money figures, and Wall Street often reacts at the opening on the following Monday. If the money supply has gone

[This article is excerpted from chapter 7 of What Has Government Done to Our Money?  ] The idea of private coinage seems so strange today that it is worth examining carefully. We are used to thinking of coinage as a “necessity of sovereignty.” Yet, after all, we are not wedded to a “royal prerogative,” and it is the American concept that

Listen to  the  Audio Mises Wire  version  of this article. The Great Society is the lineal descendant and the intensification of those other pretentiously named policies of twentieth-century America: the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Era, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the New Frontier. All of these assorted Deals constituted a basic

[Book Review: Freedom and the Law by Bruno Leoni. This review first appeared in New Individualist Review , edited by Ralph Raico.]   While at least a corporal’s guard of libertarian economists exists in America today, the situation in the other disciplines of human action is indeed bleak. Most political scientists, for example, are either engaged

I. The Konkinian Alternative II. The Problem of Organization III. The Problem of the “Kochtopus” IV. The Problem of the Libertarian Party [From Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance, Number One, May Day 1981, 3–11, a critique of the New Libertarian Manifesto [NLM] by the late agorist theoretician, Samuel Edward Konkin III (1947–2004); reprinted

Introduction: Money and Politics The Genesis of Money What is the Optimum Quantity of Money? Monetary Inflation and Counterfeiting Legalized Counterfeiting Loan Banking Deposit Banking Problems for the Fractional–Reserve Banker: The Criminal Law Problems for the Fractional–Reserve Banker: Insolvency Booms and Busts Types of Warehouse Receipts

[This article originally appeared in The Freeman (1962) as “Clichés of Socialism #7.”]   “Why, you’d take us back to the horse and buggy.” The basic fallacy of this all-too-common cliché is a confusion between technology and such other aspects of human life as morality and political principles. Over the centuries, technology tends to progress:

It might be asserted that labor unions, in exacting higher wage rates on the free market, are achieving monopoly prices. However, it is not true that a union wage rate could ever be called a monopoly price. For the characteristic of the monopolist is precisely that he monopolizes a factor or commodity. To obtain a monopoly price, he sells only

Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian? Every college student, indeed every literate person, is expected to choose up sides and pin a label on himself in the Great Debate. Most people today consider themselves as Jeffersonians. Groups as diverse as the States’ Rights (or Dixiecrat) movement and the Communists consider themselves heirs to the Jeffersonian

[A review of Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics ; Essays in European Economic Thought , edited by Louise Sommer; and Richard von Mises, Probability, Statistics, and Truth .] If the proper study of mankind is man, the question immediately arises: what is the proper way to study man? In recent generations, the enormous prestige