The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and other essays by Richard M. Ebeling

Author:Richard M. Ebeling [Richard M. Ebeling]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-93355-045-9
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Published: 1996-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

_______________

This essay was originally published as a minibook by the Constitutional Alliance of Lansing, Michigan, 1969.

Can We Still Avoid Inflation?

Friedrich A. Hayek

In one sense the question asked in the title of this lecture is purely rhetorical. I hope none of you has suspected me of doubting even for a moment that technically there is no problem in stopping inflation. If the monetary authorities really want to and are prepared to accept the consequences, they can always do so practically overnight. They fully control the base of the pyramid of credit, and a credible announcement that they will not increase the quantity of bank notes in circulation and bank deposits, and, if necessary, even decrease them, will do the trick. About this there is no doubt among economists. What I am concerned about is not the technical but the political possibilities. Here, indeed, we face a task so difficult that more and more people, including highly competent people, have resigned themselves to the inevitability of indefinitely continued inflation. I know in fact of no serious attempt to show how we can overcome these obstacles which lie not in the monetary but in the political field. And I cannot myself claim to have a patent medicine which I am sure is applicable and effective in the prevailing conditions. But I do not regard it as a task beyond the scope of human ingenuity once the urgency of the problem is generally understood. My main aim tonight is to bring out clearly why we must stop inflation if we are to preserve a viable society of free men. Once this urgent necessity is fully understood, I hope people will also gather the courage to grasp the hot irons which must be tackled if the political obstacles are to be removed and we are to have a chance of restoring a functioning market economy.

In the elementary textbook accounts, and probably also in the public mind generally, only one harmful effect of inflation is seriously considered, that on the relations between debtors and creditors. Of course, an unforeseen depreciation of the value of money harms creditors and benefits debtors. This is important but by no means the most important effect of inflation. And since it is the creditors who are harmed and the debtors who benefit, most people do not particularly mind, at least until they realize that in modern society the most important and numerous class of creditors are the wage and salary earners and the small savers, and the representative groups of debtors who profit in the first instance are the enterprises and credit institutions.

But I do not want to dwell too long on this most familiar effect of inflation which is also the one which most readily corrects itself. Twenty years ago I still had some difficulty to make my students believe that if an annual rate of price increase of five per cent were generally expected, we would have rates of interest of 9-10 per cent or more. There still seem

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.