3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Who receives newly created money first—and who pays for it later? This question gives Mises’s account of inflation its distributive and political edge. Compiled and edited by Bettina Bien Greaves from his 1960s lectures, this 2010 synthesis presents monetary expansion not simply as a rise in prices but as a transfer of purchasing power that can erode savings and evade restraints on public spending. Mises challenges the familiar picture of rich creditors and poor debtors: pensions, insurance policies, and bank deposits make ordinary households creditors too. His defence of gold rests chiefly on its resistance to cheap political multiplication, not on a promise of perfect stability. The informal examples make tangible his central distinction between creating money and producing the goods that money buys.
The problem is not to increase the quantity of money. The problem is to increase the quantity of those things which can be bought with money.