Editor’s Note: Interest rates and inflation are certainly connected to efforts on the parts of central banks to loosen and tighten the money supply. These relationships, however, are much more complex than many people suppose. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, with constant talk about what the Fed will do next, expectations are an important factor in
[First published in Inquiry , November 12, 1979.] A half-century ago, America — and then the world — was rocked by a mighty stock-market crash that soon turned into the steepest and longest-lasting depression of all time. It was not only the sharpness and depth of the depression that stunned the world and changed the face of modern history: it was
Following the Crash in 1987, many myths circulated about the nature, causes, and remedies for the crash at the time. Rothbard’s debunking of many of these myths is still informative today. Originally published in the January 1988 issue of The Free Market : Ever since Black, or Meltdown, Monday October 19th, the public has been deluged with
A selection from Chapter 42 of Economic Controversies . Why, then, does the business cycle recur? Why does the next boom-and-bust cycle always begin? To answer that, we have to understand the motivations of the banks and the government. The commercial banks live and profit by expanding credit and by creating a new money supply; so they are
[Originally appeared as “Professor Hébert on Entrepreneurship” in the Journal of Libertarian Studies 7, no. 2 (Fall, 1 985): 281–86.] Since I admittedly know more about Austrian economic theory than about Richard Cantillon, I would like to focus my comments on the Austrian aspects of Professor Hébert’s paper, in particular his discussion of
Libertarians tend to focus on two important units of analysis: the individual and the state. And yet, one of the most dramatic and significant events of our time has been the reemergence—with a bang—in the last five years of a third and much neglected aspect of the real world, the “nation.” When the “nation” has been thought of at all, it usually
This article originally appeared in the ”New Individualist Review,” vol. 2, no. 2, Summer 1962, pp. 15–27. The extortions and oppressions of government will go on so long as such bare fraudulence deceives and disarms the victims—so long as they are ready to swallow the immemorial official theory that protesting against the stealings of the
[ From “ Alleged Joys of the Society of Status “ in Power and Market , Chapter 6. ] One common related criticism of the free market and free society (particularly among intellectuals who are conspicuously not craftsmen or peasants) is that, in contrast to the Happy Craftsmen and Happy Peasants of the Middle Ages, it has “alienated” man from his
[ Excerpt from Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market , chapter 6: Antimarket Ethics: A Praxeological Critique (2009), pp. 1303–06.] Some writers are astute enough to realize that the market economy is simply a resultant of individual valuations, and thus they see that, if they do not like the results, the fault lies with the valuations,
[Excerpted from America’s Great Depression , chapter 1 “The Positive Theory of the Cycle,” section “The Explanation: Boom and Depression,” pages 9–14 .] In the purely free and unhampered market, there will be no cluster of errors, since trained entrepreneurs will not all make errors at the same time. The “boom-bust” cycle is generated by monetary
What is the Mises Institute?
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.
