Not long ago, many economists were convinced that monetary policy should aim at achieving “full employment.” Those who looked upon monetary expansion as a way to eradicate almost all unemployment failed to appreciate that persistent unemployment is a nonmonetary or “natural” economic condition which no amount of monetary medicine can cure. Today
George Selgin (University of Georgia), Review of: The Great Depression: An International Disaster of Perverse Economic Policies by Thomas Hall and David Ferguson (University of Michigan Press, 1998) Southern Economic Journal Jan. 1999. Vol. 65, No. 3. pp 653-656. Many people-some economists included-still view the Great Depression as proof of the
Editor’s Preface The World’s Toyshop From the Old Square Down Cherry Street Around St. Philip’s The Prospect at Newhall To Snow Hill Near the Birmingham Canal Pickard’s Steam Engines To Summer Row by Way of Lionel At the Red Lion In Thomason’s Manufactory This “missing chapter” is excerpted from an early draft of Professor Selgin’s new book, Good
Coin dealers and collectors are still reeling from the US Mint’s announcement that it had run out of American Eagle gold coins. But what ought to surprise every American isn’t that a government agency came up short. It’s that the US government should be making little metal discs at all. Coin shortages are nothing new. A few months before running
David Henderson and Jeff Hummel have managed to ruffle quite a few Austrian feathers with their recent Cato briefing paper, and no wonder: that paper claims not only that Alan Greenspan’s Fed was innocent of any role in encouraging the housing boom but that Greenspan had actually managed to do something Austrian monetary economists have long
Austrian economics emerged in rebellion against skepticism. The predominant economic doctrine in continental Europe at the time of its founding, that championed by the German historical school under Gustav Schmoller, rejected the idea of an economic science devoted to the explanation of market phenomena in terms of exact and universal laws. It
Region Focus interviewed me . It’s a publication of the Fed of Richmond. “The way I envision free banking, it does not rely on a particular base regime. It’s true, as a matter of history, that if you had free banking from the get-go, you wouldn’t have central banks and you would almost certainly have a commodity money standard, probably gold. The
Volume 12, No. 1 (2009) In a free market economy from which fiduciary media are excluded, economic progress will be limited, perhaps severely, by the high cost and correspondingly limited supply of small-denomination money—money that is needed to accomplish retail and other low-value exchanges. Historically, fiduciary token coins have proven to
From The Review of Austrian Economics Vol. 9, No. 2 1996.
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