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“Mises was not just some quack, he was a serious economist. He was named a distinguished fellow of the American Economics Association in 1969, and he won the highest medal for scientific achievement in his home country of Austria. There is a great article by Paul Samuelson on who would have won the Nobel Prize in economics if it had started the same year as the other Nobel Prizes, and Mises is on his list. This book was originally published by Yale University Press, and John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a review of it in The New York Times. Mises made at least three significant contributions to economics. The first contribution is in money and business cycle theory. What Mises tried to show is how money is central to all exchanges, because in a monetary economy, goods trade for money and money trades for goods. Goods don’t trade directly with other goods. Since money is one-half of all exchanges, if you screw around with money, you’re going to screw around with all the exchanges in the economy. He postulated that when the government distorts the monetary unit, through the manipulation of money and credit, it can generate boom-and-bust cycles. So rather than the business cycle being inherent to capitalism, it’s a consequence of distortions caused by the manipulation of money and credit.” Read more...
The best books on Austrian Economics
Peter Boettke, Economist
