This file is a short foreword by Ludwig von Mises to Percy L. Greaves, Jr.’s Understanding the Dollar Crisis, a volume based on seven lectures delivered in Buenos Aires in 1969. Its scope is not to summarize each lecture in detail, but to frame the whole work as an inquiry into economics at its most fundamental level: not merely money, banking, or policy technique, but human action itself.
The seven lectures that Professor Percy L. Greaves, Jr., delivered in June 1969 before the Centro de Estudios sobre la Libertad in Buenos Aires deal with the fundamental economic problems; they are about "human life," about "the ideas that motivate human beings," about "the most important and interesting drama of all—human action."
Mises’s central move is to ground monetary economics in a broader anthropology of action. He begins by distinguishing between what human beings can influence and what remains beyond their power. This distinction allows him to reject both fatalism and technocratic omnipotence: human knowledge expands, and action matters, but policy cannot abolish reality’s limits.
To us, mortal human beings as we are, the universe appears as consisting of two different fields or regions: the field of events human action is able to influence to some extent and the field of events that are beyond the reach of any human action.
The foreword therefore treats economics as a science of purposeful conduct within constraints. Mises emphasizes that civilization advances through growing knowledge of causal laws, yet he sharply denies that this progress will ever make man omniscient. Action is meaningful because it aims at chosen ends, but it remains bounded by conditions not of man’s own choosing.
Man acts; that means, he tries to bring about definite effects.
The section titled “The Gold Standard” applies this framework to monetary history. Mises presents gold not as an arbitrary convention but as the historically evolved medium that made large-scale exchange, international division of labor, and modern capitalism technically workable. The key point is institutional: a monetary order must be protected from manipulation by those who benefit from changing money’s purchasing power.
The gold standard made the marvelous evolution of modern capitalism technically possible.
Mises’s defense of gold is not sentimental but structural. Its value, in his account, lies in the fact that its supply is limited by natural conditions rather than political discretion. This makes it a check on inflationary and deflationary experiments alike, both of which he treats as unsustainable violations of monetary order.
Neither inflation nor deflation is a policy that can last.
The relevance of the foreword lies in how compactly it links Austrian praxeology, monetary theory, and policy criticism. Mises presents the dollar crisis not as a technical accident but as a consequence of abandoning sound monetary principles. The closing judgment situates Greaves’s lectures as more than instruction in textbook economics: they are meant to clarify the meaning and consequences of competing economic policies.
They are an attempt to analyze and to explain the meaning and the effects of the various systems, methods, and measures of economic policies.
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