"On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers." -- Murray N. Rothbard
This quote nicely summarizes this important and widely read work by noted economist Murray Rothbard.
Rothbard was of the Austrian School of economics and studied under the legendary Ludwig von Mises -- and in many ways continued the work of von Mises. Economists of the Austrian School support free market economics and criticize command economies because they destroy the information function of prices and inevitably lead to totalitarianism. They argue that "economic theory is the working out of the logical implications of the fact that humans engage in purposeful action."
In this work, "What Has Government Done to Our Money?" Rothbard provides historical context for his critique of U.S. monetary policy. He lays out a blueprint for a return to the gold standard as a way to break the economic cycles that plague modern economies.
This work is formatted especially for the Kindle with a hyperlinked table of contents along with notes throughout the text which makes navigation using the Kindle reader very easy.