Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 510 pages
- Published by: Ludwig Von Mises Inst August 30, 2002
- ISBN 10 Number: 0945466331
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0945466338
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Book Dimensions:
9 x 5.4 x 1.4 inches
- Weighs: 1.8 pounds
Product Description
In what is sure to become the standard account, Rothbard traces inflations, banking panics, and money meltdowns from the Colonial Period through the mid-20th century to show how government's systematic war on sound money is the hidden force behind nearly all major economic calamities in American history.
Never has the story of money and banking been told with such rhetorical power and theoretical vigor. You will treasure this volume.
From the introduction by Joseph Salerno:
"Rothbard employs the Misesian approach to economic history consistently and dazzlingly throughout the volume to unravel the causes and consequences of events and institutions ranging over the course of U.S. monetary history, from the colonial times through the New Deal era. One of the important benefits of Rothbard's unique approach is that it naturally leads to an account of the development of the U.S. monetary system in terms of a compelling narrative linking human motives and plans that often-times are hidden, and devious, leading to outcomes that sometimes are tragic. And one will learn much more about monetary history from reading this exciting story than from poring over reams of statistical analysis. Although its five parts were written separately, this volume presents a relative integrated narrative, with very little overlap, that sweeps across three hundreds years of U.S. monetary history."
About The Author
Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) distinguished himself as an economist, writing a major treatise on theory, several important economic histories, and a highly praised history of economic thought. But he was also known as the pioneer thinker of libertarianism, the political philosophy that roots freedom in private property ownership and decries the state as inherently contrary to the ethics of a free society. Writing from this perspective, he gained a reputation as the most provocative and influential contributor to the anarchist tradition in our century.
Reader ReviewsAbsolutely fabulous! Only the incomparable Rothbard could tell this compelling story in its full richness and detail. Here the hidden history of money and banking in America unfolds as the internecine, behind-the-scenes warfare between elite financial interests such as the House of Morgan and the Rockefellers, the electoral struggle between the Hamiltonian Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans, and the duel-to-the-death Bank War of Nicholas Biddle and Andrew Jackson. Discover the intriguing facts of how post-Civil War ethnoreligious political conflict between postmillennial pietist Protestant Republicans versus liturgical libertarian Democrats translated into deeply-felt attitudes toward inflation, sound money, and the Gold Standard. Explore the arcane and clandestine origins of the powerful Federal Reserve, a secretive institution still clouded in mystery and myth. This magnificent volume of unpublished and previously published writings by the late Murray N. Rothbard deserves to be on the shelf of every careful scholar of political economy, and of everyone who enjoys the discovery of unseasonable and unsettling truths concerning the government elites who attempt to run our lives, debase our money, and squander our children's futures.
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