Prices are rising, as they inevitably must with an expansionary policy, and who is getting the blame? Not the Fed. Commentators claim it's the weather or foreigners with greedy appetites for goods.
It has always been so. When the inflation arrives, the relationship between cause and effect is lost. This precisely why Henry Hazlitt wrote The Inflation Crisis and How to Resolve It. He drives home the point that the issue is not weather, not greed, not gouging, but monetary policy coming from the central bank.
It's never been more important to hear and share Hazlitt's message.
Hazlitt knew the works of Mises as well as anyone, but he was not mainly a theoretician. He was a financial journalist, commentator, and interpreter of current events. In this sense, he was one of a kind: a learned economist with feet in the real world of politics, financial markets, and the economics of everyday life.
By inflation, he didn't mean rising prices. He meant the tendency of government and the central bank to print money in pursuit of prosperity. In this sense, no book could be more directly related to our own times, as Bernanke and his inflationist friends use and abuse the power of the Federal Reserve as never before.
First comes the printing; then come the business cycles and price increases. The only cure is to end the government's power to print. For this reason, Hazlitt favors a gold standard.
From a reader's point of view, Hazlitt's book is pure pleasure. As Mencken said of him, he was the only economist of his generation who could really write. He is clear as a bell, and why? Because he had a passion for explaining economics to every living person. He did not think that economics should be left to the academy or to investment firms. Like Mises, he believed economics was the business of everyone.
