By special arrangement with the authors, the Mises Institute is thrilled to bring back this popular guide to ridiculous economic policy from the ancient world to modern times. This outstanding history illustrates the utter futility of fighting the market process through legislation. It always uses despotic measures to yield socially catastrophic results.
It covers the ancient world, the Roman Republic and Empire, Medieval Europe, the first centuries of the U.S. and Canada, the French Revolution, the 19th century, World War I and II, the Nazis, the Soviets, postwar rent control, and the 1970s. It also includes a very helpful conclusion spelling out the theory of wage and price controls.
This book is a treasure, and super entertaining!
192 Pages, Paperback, 2009
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Prof. CJ
Schuettinger and Bulter's FORTY CENTURIES OF WAGE AND PRICE CONTROLS, written and first printed in the late-1970s (when stagflation was raging) looks at the phenomenon of inflation, and at governments' efforts to fight it through price fixing, throughout the last four millenia -- from the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, through the Romans, medieval times, the early modern era, and into the twentieth century. To make a long story short, wage and price controls have NEVER been truly effective at fighting inflation, and almost always lead to even worse unintended consequences.
If you want to understand why wage and price controls never really work, and more often than not lead to side effects that are worse than the original problem of rising prices, you should read this book. It's amazing to find out that the ancients did the same stupid things that we keep doing from time to time today, and that it worked just as poorly when they tried it as it does for us moderns.
The authors -- whether looking at Revolutionary France, Weimar Germany, or Diocletian's Rome -- find a predictable pattern that goes roughly as follows: Excessive money creation, currency debasement, and/or spending by government leads to (surprise surprise) rising prices for goods and services. The government (whether monarchical or democratic doesn't seem to matter in this regard) refuses to acknowledge or accept its own culpability and instead blames private interests (who are often characterized as "greedy" and "selfish", even though it is the government's policies that have forced them to raise prices in order to stay alive in an inflationary economy.)
So instead of altering its monetary and/or fiscal policies, the state institutes price and/or wage controls, which are really superficial attempts to treat the symptoms of inflation (rising prices) rather than the actual cause (excessive money creation and/or debasement.) The price controls INEVITABLY lead to worse problems -- shortages, rationing, black markets, hoarding, and, when they are not repealed, can end in the drastic reduction of trade and commerce overall, the economic destruction of the middle class, a total command economy, and ultimately either despotism or anarchy (in the bad sense.)
Admittedly, this isn't the easiest read in the world -- it can be a little on the dry and scholarly side. However, the relevance of its material is so strong, and the amount of information it contains so germane, that it should be read by anyone who is at all uneasy with the US government's current policy of "borrow, print, spend" which, if not ceased, will inevitably lead to some of the bad things that the authors of this book describe in ages past. That is why I think it deserves five stars.
The only danger is, in reading this book, you may suffer from an aneurysm or heart attack brought on by frustration -- it is simply astonishing how frequently people willingly repeat the economic missteps of our ancestors! To be truly educated is, almost inevitably, to become a cynic.
The authors of this book put it well: "If an historian were to sum up what we have learned from the long history of wage and price controls in this country and in many others around the world, he would have to conclude that the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
[NOTE: For the reader who doesn't have much prior knowledge of economics, I recommend reading Henry Hazlitt's ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON or Thomas Sowell's BASIC ECONOMICS first to get a first-class, nuts-and-bolts explanation of things like prices, price controls, and rationing in easy-to read and -understand terms.]
If you want to understand why wage and price controls never really work, and more often than not lead to side effects that are worse than the original problem of rising prices, you should read this book. It's amazing to find out that the ancients did the same stupid things that we keep doing from time to time today, and that it worked just as poorly when they tried it as it does for us moderns.
The authors -- whether looking at Revolutionary France, Weimar Germany, or Diocletian's Rome -- find a predictable pattern that goes roughly as follows: Excessive money creation, currency debasement, and/or spending by government leads to (surprise surprise) rising prices for goods and services. The government (whether monarchical or democratic doesn't seem to matter in this regard) refuses to acknowledge or accept its own culpability and instead blames private interests (who are often characterized as "greedy" and "selfish", even though it is the government's policies that have forced them to raise prices in order to stay alive in an inflationary economy.)
So instead of altering its monetary and/or fiscal policies, the state institutes price and/or wage controls, which are really superficial attempts to treat the symptoms of inflation (rising prices) rather than the actual cause (excessive money creation and/or debasement.) The price controls INEVITABLY lead to worse problems -- shortages, rationing, black markets, hoarding, and, when they are not repealed, can end in the drastic reduction of trade and commerce overall, the economic destruction of the middle class, a total command economy, and ultimately either despotism or anarchy (in the bad sense.)
Admittedly, this isn't the easiest read in the world -- it can be a little on the dry and scholarly side. However, the relevance of its material is so strong, and the amount of information it contains so germane, that it should be read by anyone who is at all uneasy with the US government's current policy of "borrow, print, spend" which, if not ceased, will inevitably lead to some of the bad things that the authors of this book describe in ages past. That is why I think it deserves five stars.
The only danger is, in reading this book, you may suffer from an aneurysm or heart attack brought on by frustration -- it is simply astonishing how frequently people willingly repeat the economic missteps of our ancestors! To be truly educated is, almost inevitably, to become a cynic.
The authors of this book put it well: "If an historian were to sum up what we have learned from the long history of wage and price controls in this country and in many others around the world, he would have to conclude that the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
[NOTE: For the reader who doesn't have much prior knowledge of economics, I recommend reading Henry Hazlitt's ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON or Thomas Sowell's BASIC ECONOMICS first to get a first-class, nuts-and-bolts explanation of things like prices, price controls, and rationing in easy-to read and -understand terms.]
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