Here are two of Hayek's greatest essays in one small and beautiful volume at a very low price. It is a perfect way to introduce yourself and others to this giant of the 20th century.

The book begins with Hayek's most excellent essay on money. It is also his most radical. He plainly says that central banks cannot be reformed. There can never be sound money so long as they are in charge. He calls for their complete abolition, no compromises accepted. He wants the market in charge of money from top to bottom.

His words predicting crisis followed by wild swings in valuation are up to the minute. He also relates the quality of money with the recurrence of crisis, showing an excellent application of Austrian theory.

Hayek was deeply influenced by Mises, and this shows here in the area of money.

The second essay is "The Pretense of Knowledge," his shocking Nobel speech that explained why the very idea of government in our times is unintellectual, presumptuous, and untenable. He is as critical of socialism as he is of interventionism. He shows that the state is not capable of doing all that it is charged with doing, and why conceding it any role in social and economic management is dangerous to liberty.

It was not the speech everyone expected. But it lived up to Hayek's lifelong commitment to telling truth to power.

This small book is really a first in the Hayekian literature: small form, powerful words, and by the great man himself.

Download A Free-Market Monetary System and Pretense of Knowledge

PDF format, 159KB, 56Pages.

Ludwig von Mises Institute
518 West Magnolia Avenue
Auburn, Alabama 36832 U.S.A.
www.mises.org
ISBN: 978-1-933550-37-4

CONTENTS
A Free-Market Monetary System
The Pretense of Knowledge

A claim for equality of material position can be met only be a government with totalitarian powers.
- F.A. Hayek

A FREE-MARKET MONETARY SYSTEM
When a little over two years ago, at the second Lausanne Conference of this group, I threw out, almost as a sort of bitter joke, that there was no hope of ever again having decent money, unless we took from government the monopoly of issuing money and handed it over to private industry, I took it only half seriously.

But the suggestion proved extraordinarily fertile. Following it up I discovered that I had opened a possibility which in two thousand years no single economist had ever studied. There were quite a number of people who have since taken it up and we have devoted a great deal of study and analysis to this possibility.

As a result I am more convinced than ever that if we ever again are going to have a decent money, it will not come from government: it will be issued by private enterprise, because providing the public with good money which it can trust and use can not only be an extremely profitable business; it imposes on the issuer a discipline to which the government has never been and cannot be subject. It is a business which competing enterprise can maintain only if it gives the public as good a money as anybody else. ...

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