The Free Market 4, no. 2 (February 1986) I: Keynesians and Fixed Exchange Rates, 1944–73 The world is in permanent monetary crisis, but once in a while, the crisis flares up acutely, and we noisily shift gears from one flawed monetary system to another. We go back and forth from fixed paper rates to fluctuating rates, to some inchoate and
The Free Market 4, no. 9 (September 1986) In the last few months, the Reagan administration seems to have achieved the culmination of its “economic miracle” of the last several years: while the money supply has skyrocketed upward in double digits, the consumer price index has remained virtually flat. Money cheap and abundant, stock and bond
The Free Market 4, no. 11 (November 1986) September 1986 is an historic month in the history of United States monetary policy. For it is the first month in over fifty years—thanks to the heroic leadership of Ron Paul during his four terms in Congress—that the United States Treasury has minted a genuine gold coin. Gold coins were the standard
The Free Market 5, no. 4 (April 1987) Not all hard-money supporters favor the gold-coin standard or any Treasury minting of gold coins. A few “purists” charge those of us who advocate a gold standard with being “gold socialists” because the Treasury would, at least initially, be minting the gold coins. Why not, they say, simply start minting
[ Previously unpublished online; Faith and Freedom 1, no. 3 (February 1950). ] When the war of the American Colonies against the British Crown broke out in 1775, the money supply of the Colonies consisted of about ten million dollars in gold and silver coins — “specie.” The taxation was difficult for the newly-formed Continental Congress and its
Volume 2, No. 3 (Fall 1999) The financial elites of this country, notably the Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb interests, were responsible for putting through the Federal Reserve System, as a governmentally created and sanctioned cartel device to enable the nation’s banks to inflate the money supply in a coordinated fashion, without
The Free Market 24, no. 7 (July 2004) [Editorial Note: Price inflation now having reared its head in many sectors, despite constant downward pressure on prices from innovation and imports, and the business cycle continuing to plague the world economy, it is time to revisit a neglected classic from Murray Rothbard, an excerpt from a long study that
The Free Market 9, no. 3 (March 1991) There has been a veritable revolution in the attitude of the nation’s economists, as well as the public, toward our banking system. Ever since 1933, it was a stem dogma—a virtual article of faith—among economic textbooks, financial writers, and all establishment economists from Keynesians to Milton Friedman,
The Free Market 9, no. 4 (April 1991) Few occurrences have been more dreaded and reviled in the ‘history of economic thought than deflation. Even as perceptive a hardmoney theorist as Ricardo was unduly leery of deflation, and a positive phobia about falling prices has been central to both Keynesian and monetarist thought. Both the inflationary
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.