3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Can a predictable monetary rule prevent instability if credit expansion itself distorts investment? In this essay, Hans Sennholz welcomes Milton Friedman’s challenge to Keynesian economics, but argues that monetarism retains key premises of the approach it challenges: reliance on economic aggregates and government monetary management. Against Friedman’s proposed steady growth of the money supply, Sennholz argues that even modest expansion can depress interest rates below levels warranted by saving and encourage unsustainable investments. The contrast brings a concrete disagreement into focus: stable prices need not mean coordinated production. Readers can discover why an Austrian defence of markets may reject monetarist policy, and how Sennholz’s case for gold and freedom of monetary contract shifts the debate from choosing better management rules to questioning monetary authority itself.
A monetary institution can emerge without a designer, yet changing a currency requires deliberate choices with unequal consequences. Hans Sennholz explores this tension through Carl Menger’s monetary writings and proposals for Austria-Hungary’s currency reform. In this chapter, republished in 1992, he connects Menger’s account of money’s spontaneous origin with practical concerns about convertibility, debt contracts, and governmental discretion. Menger’s advocacy of gold appears not as a demand for exclusively metallic circulation, but as a case for dependable redemption and a cautious transition that would avoid arbitrary gains for creditors or losses for debtors. Sennholz also identifies what Menger left unexplained about purchasing power. The resulting portrait shows how a theorist of individual exchange confronted the difficulty of making a legally declared monetary standard work in actual markets.