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*新书上架*【哈耶克】流通中的选择:制止膨胀的方式 [0] [1] INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS The Institute was formed in 1957 as a research and educational trust that specializes in the study of markets and pricing systems as technical devices for registering preferences and apportioning resources. Micro...

*新书上架*【哈耶克】流通中的选择:制止膨胀的方式
[0] [1] INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS The Institute was formed in 1957 as a research and educational trust that specializes in the study of markets and pricing systems as technical devices for registering preferences and apportioning resources. Micro- economic analysis forms the kernel of economics and is relevant and illuminating in both public and private sectors, in collectivist as well as in individualist societies. Where the macroeconomic method is used its results are verified and interpreted in the light of micro-economic significance. The Institute's work is assisted by an advisory council which includes: Professor Armen A. Alchian Professor E. Victor Morgan Professor J. M. Buchanan Professor Alan T. Peacock Colin Clark G. J. Ponsonby Professor R. H. Coase Professor A. R. Prest Professor R. F. Henderson Professor H. B. Rose Professor T. W. Hutchison George Schwartz Graham Hutton Henry Smith Professor Harry G. Johnson Professor A. A. Walters Professor Dennis Lees Professor Jack Wiseman Professor B. S. Yamey The Institute is a company limited by guarantee, controlled by Managing Trustees. It is independent of any political party or group, and financed by sales of publications and by voluntary contributions from individuals, organizations and companies. General Director Ralph Harris Editorial Director Arthur Seldon Deputy Director John B. Wood Assistant to Directors Publications Manager Joan Culverwell Michael Solly Librarian Kenneth Smith THE INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS 2 Lord North Street, Westminster, London, SW1P 3LB Telephone: 020 7799 8900 Choice in Currency A WAY TO STOP INFLATION F. A. HAYEK Nobel Laureate 1974 with Commentaries by IVOR F. PEARCE • HAROLD B. ROSE DOUGLAS JAY • SIR KEITH JOSEPH Published by THE INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS 1976 Web Edition prepared in 2007. There may be minor differences from the original. [2] [3] First published February 1976 by THE INSTITUTE OF ECONOMIC AFFAIRS @ The Institute of Economic Affairs 1976 All rights reserved SBN 255 36078-9 Printed in Great Britain by TONBRIDGE PRINTERS LTD, TONBRIDGE KENT Set in Intertype Plantin Contents PREFACE………………………………………….Arthur Seldon……………… 5 THE AUTHOR…………………………………………………………………..8 I MONEY, KEYNES AND HISTORY..……………………………………….9 Keynesian rehabilitation……………………………………………..10 Personal confession………………………………………………….10 II THE MANUFACTURE OF UNEMPLOYMENT…………………………11 Unemployment via ‘full employment policies’……………………...12 The lost generation…………………………………………………..13 The 1863 penny……………………………………………………...13 III THE WEAKNESS OF POLITICAL CONTROL OF MONEY..……….…..14 Group interests harmful……………………………………………..14 Rebuilding the resistances to inflation………………………………15 Protecting money from politics……………………………………..16 A dangerous monopoly……………………………………………..16 IV CHOICE OF MONEY FOR PAYMENT IN CONTRACTS...…………….17 Government and legal tender………………………………………..17 Benefits of free currency system……………………………………19 V LONG-RUN MONETARY STABILITY……...…………………………..20 ‘The universal prize’………………………………………………..20 Free dealings in money better than monetary unions………………21 A COMMENT ON KEYNES, BEVERIDGE AND KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS……………………………………………………………… 23 [4] [5] COMMENTARIES: Professor Ivor Pearce………………………………………………...25 Professor Harold Rose……………………………………………….26 Rt. Hon. Douglas Jay………………………………………………...27 Rt. Hon. Sir Keith Joseph……………………………………………28 A NOTE ON GOVERNMENT MONOPOLY OF MONEY IN THEORY AND HISTORY ……………………Sudha Shenoy……………….30 I. THEORY………………………………………………………….30 II. HISTORY………………………………………………...………34 France, 1789… ……….……………………………...34 USA, before and after 1857…………………………….38 Germany, 1920-23……………………………………...39 AND A PORTENT…? Currency Option for Foreign Creditors…………………………….. 45 Preface THE Occasional Papers are intended to make essays or addresses, of outstanding importance, accessible to a wider readership than that to which they were originally addressed. The 47 so far have included Papers by some of Britain's, and the world's, leading economists but also some important Papers by less well-known names. . No. 48 is an edited version of an address by Professor F. A. Hayek to a conference in Switzerland. In a sense it is a sequel to Occasional Paper 45, in which Professor Hayek argued that the cause of unemployment was not inadequate demand, arising from inadequate total income, but disproportions in relative wages required to equate the demand for labour and its supply in each sector of the economy. The error of supposing that full employment, high output and prosperity could be maintained by enlarging total money expenditure is described in this Paper as an age-old superstit ion to which Keynes and his followers have given the sanction of scientific authority. In this Paper Professor Hayek considers the conditions under which it is possible for government to enlarge total expenditure by increasing the quantity of money. He argues that history indicates that, sooner or later, the control of the supply of money by government has ended in inflation. Hence the development of national and international monetary systems based on gold and other devices designed to remove from government the powers it invariably abused. The opposite view, argued strongly in recent years in Britain, is that, if government was released from rigid mechanical rules in domestic or overseas monetary management, such as fixed exchange rates, it would be better able to act for the general good. This expectation, it is now evident, has not been realised because, although the rules were reasonably clear, government has found them politically tempting to break in practice. This is not a theoretical doubt whether government can improve on an automatic or semi-automa tic monetary system, such as a gold or gold-exchange standard, in which the supply and value [6] [7] of money is beyond domestic political control. It is a practical judgement in political economy that a government subject to electoral pressures will not be able to observe the rules if to do so brings transitionary dislocation and unemployment. Professor Hayek therefore argues that the time may have come to remove from government the power to require its citizens to use the money under its control. And in the last resort this would require that government be deprived of the power to define legal tender. The requirement is not to deprive government of the power to issue money but to deny it the exclusive right to do so and to force the citizenry to use it at the price it specifies. It is thus the government monopoly of money that is objectionable, and history is full of examples of governments that have attempted to enforce their power by extreme measures, including the ultimate sanction of death. The solution is therefore to allow people to use the money they find most convenient, whether the money issued by their own government or by other governments. Professor Hayek argues that this system would be more desirable and practicable than a utopian European Monetary Unit. This proposal, Professor Hayek recognises, may seem far- fetched after centuries in which it has been considered that one of the proper, or essential, functions of government is to provide a currency on which the citizens could depend as a reliable unit of account and means of exchange, a function which has included the concept of legal tender. Professor Hayek denies that legal tender is an essential part of the monetary function of government. He argues that people should be free to refuse money they distrust in favour of money in which they have confidence. It is this new power of the people to refuse the national money that would induce national governments to ensure that their money was stable in value. Hence Professor Hayek argues the case for a new kind of international money. In this Occasional Paper Professor Hayek has provided stimulating analysis of a contemporary problem and emerged with a radical solution. He considers ways in which the system might work in practice, and replies to objections to it. He discusses the effects it will have on banking systems, and in so doing he provides a commentary on the current debate on money and inflation and on the desired national and international institutions. Here it will come as no surprise to learn that he believes an international monetary authority is hardly to be trusted more than a national authority: he would confine government to 'a framework of legal roles in which the people could develop the monetary institutions that best suit them'. To indicate the possibly varying views on the importance and the practicality of Professor Hayek's proposals we invited com- ments from two economists and two senior politicians who have held high government office. The economists are Professor Ivor Pearce and Professor Harold Rose. Both politicians, Mr Douglas Jay and Sir Keith Joseph, are Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, and are especially interested in economic affairs. To illustrate the argument Miss Sudha Shenoy has assembled extracts from economic and historical writings on the failure of governments in France and Germany to confine the use of money to legal tender despite severe penalties and on the fall in the value of paper legal tender as its supply was increased during periods of inflation, and on the exclusion by the US Government of currencies other than the dollar. November 1975 ARTHUR SELDON [8] [9] The Author FRIEDRICH AUGUST HAYEK, Dr Jur, Dr Sc Pol (Vienna), DSc (Econ.) (London), Visiting Professor at the University of Salzburg, Austria, 1970-74. Educated at the University of Vienna, Director of the Austrian Institute for Economic Research, 1927-31, and Lecturer in Economics at the University of Vienna, 1929-31. 1931-50 Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics, University of London. 1950-62 Professor of Social and Moral Science, University of Chicago. Professor of Economics, University of Freiburg i.Brg., West Germany, 1962- 68. He was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974. Professor Hayek's most important publications inc lude Mone- tary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933), The Pure Theory of Capital (1941), The Road to Serfdom (1944), Individualism and Economic Order (1948), The Counter-Revolution of Science. (1952), and The Constitution of Liberty (1960). His latest works are col1ections of his writings under the titles Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (Vo1. I, 1973). He has also edited several books and has published artic1es in the Economic Journal, Economica and other journals. The IEA has published his The Confusion of Language in Political Thought (Occasional Paper 20, 1968), his Wincott Memoria1 Lecture, Economic Freedom and Representative Government (Occasiona1 Paper 39, 1973), a collection of his writings with a new essay (assembled by Sudha Shenoy), A Tiger by the Tail (Hobart Paperback 4, 1972), an essay in Verdict on Rent Control (IEA Readings NO.7, 1972), and Full Employment at Any Price? (Occasional Paper 45, 1975). Choice in Currency: A Way to Stop Inflation1 F.A.HAYEK I. MONEY, KEYNES AND HISTORY2 THE CHIEF ROOT of our present monetary troubles is, of course, the sanction of scientific authority which Lord Keynes and his disciples have given to the age-old superstition that by increasing the aggregate of money expenditure we can lastingly ensure prosperity and full employment. It is a superstition against which economists before Keynes had struggled with some success for at least two centuries.3 It had governed most of earlier history. This history, indeed, has been largely a history of inflation; significantly, it was only during the rise of the prosperous modern industrial systems and during the rule of the gold standard, that over a period of about two hundred years (in Britain from about 1714 to 1914, and in the United States from about 1749 to 1939) prices were at the end about where they had been at the beginning. During this unique period of monetary stability the gold standard had imposed upon monetary authorities a discipline which prevented them from abusing their powers, as they have done 1 Based on an Address entitled ‘International Money’ delivered to the Geneva Gold and Monetary Conference on 25 September, 1975, at Lausanne, Switzerland. 2 [The main section and sub-headings have been inserted to help readers, especially non- economists unfamiliar with Professor Hayek’s writings, to follow the argument; they were not part of the original lecture.-ED.] 3 [This observation is amplified by Professor Hayek in a note, ‘A Comment on Keynes, Beveridge and Keynesian Economics’, page 23.-ED.] [10] [11] at nearly all other times. Experience in other parts of the world does not seem to have been very different: I have been told that a Chinese law attempted to prohibit paper money for all times (of course, ineffectively), long before the Europeans ever invented it! Keynesian rehabilitation It was John Maynard Keynes, a man of great intellect but limited knowledge of economic theory, who ultimately succeeded in rehabilitating a view long the preserve of cranks with whom he openly sympathised. He had attempted by a succession of new theories to justify the same, superficially persuasive, intuitive belief that had been held by many practical men before, but that will not withstand rigorous analysis of the price mechanism: just as there cannot be a uniform price for all kinds of labour, an equality of demand and supply for labour in general cannot be secured by managing aggregate demand. The volume of employment depends on the correspondence of demand and supply in each sector of the economy, and therefore on the wage structure and the distribution of demand between the sectors. The consequence is that over a longer period the Keynesian remedy does not cure unemployment but makes it worse. The claim of an eminent public figure and brilliant polemicist to provide a cheap and easy means of permanently preventing serious unemployment conquered public opinion and, after his death, professional opinion too. Sir John Hicks has even proposed that we call the third quarter of this century, 1950 to 1975, the age of Keynes, as the second quarter was the age of Hitler.1 I do not feel that the harm Keynes did is really so much as to justify that description. But it is true that, so long as his prescriptions seemed to work, they operated as an orthodoxy which it appeared useless to oppose. Personal confession I have often blamed myself for having given up the struggle after I had spent much time and energy criticising the first version of Keynes's theoretical framework. Only after the second part of my critique had appeared did he tell me he had 1 John Hicks, The Crisis in Keynesian Economics, Oxford University Press, 1974, p.1. changed his mind and no longer believed what he had said in the Treatise on Money of 1930 (somewhat unjustly towards himself, as it seems to me, since I still believe that volume II of the Treatise contains some of the best work he ever did). At any rate, I felt it then to be useless to return to the charge, because he seemed so likely to change his views again. When it proved that this new version - the General Theory of 1936 - conquered most of the professional opinion, and when in the end even some of the colleagues I most respected supported the wholly Keynesian Bretton Woods agreement, I largely withdrew from the debate, since to proclaim my dissent from the near-unanimous views of the orthodox phalanx would merely have deprived me of a hearing on other matters about which I was more concerned at the time. (I believe, however, that, so far as some of the best British economists were concerned, their support of Bretton Woods was determined more by a misguided patriotism - the hope that it would benefit Britain in her post-war difficulties - than by a belief that it would provide a satisfactory international monetary order.) II THE MANUFACTURE OF UNEMPLOYMENT I WROTE 36 years ago on the crucial point of difference: 'It may perhaps be pointed out that it has, of course, never been denied that employment can be rapidly increased, and a position of "full employment" achieved in the shortest possible time, by means of monetary expansion - least of all by those economists whose outlook has been influenced by the experience of a major inflation. All that has been contended is that the kind of full employment which can be created in this way is inherently unstable, and that to create employment by these means is to perpetuate fluctuations. There may be desperate situations in which it may indeed be necessary to increase employment at all costs, even if it be only for a short period - perhaps the situation in which Dr Brüning found himself in Germany in 1932 was such a situation in which desperate means would have been justified. But the economist should not conceal the fact that to [12] [13] aim at the maximum of employment which can be achieved in the short run by means of monetary policy is essentially the policy of the desperado who has nothing to lose and everything to gain from a short breathing space.’1 To this I would now like to add, in reply to the constant deliberate misrepresentation of my views by politicians, who like to picture me as a sort of bogey whose influence makes conservative parties dangerous, what I regularly emphasize and stated nine months ago in my Nobel Memorial Prize Lecture at Stockholm in the following words: 'The truth is that by a mistaken theoretical view we have been led into a precarious position in which we cannot prevent substantial unemployment from re-appearing: not because, as my view is sometimes misrepresented, this unemployment is deliberately brought about as a means to combat inflation, but because it is now bound to appear as a deeply regrettable but inescapable consequence of the mistaken policies of the past as soon as inflation ceases to accelerate.'2 Unemployment via 'full employment policies' This manufacture of unemployment by what are called 'full employment policies' is a complex process. In essence it operates by temporary changes in the distribution of demand, drawing both unemployed and already employed workers into jobs which will disappear with the end of inflation. In the periodically recurrent crises of the pre-1914 years the expansion of credit during the preceding boom served largely to finance industrial investment, and the over-development and subsequent unemployment occurred mainly in the industries producing capital equipment. In the engineered inflation of the last decades things were more complex. What will happen during a major inflation is illustrated by 1 F.A. Hayek, Profits, Interest and Investment, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1939, p. 63n. 2 F.A. Hayek, ‘The Pretence of Knowledge’, Nobel Memorial Prize Lecture 1974, reprinted in Full Employment at Any Price?,
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