A Program to Stabilize the Economy—in Four Words

Mises Wire:

Paul Cantor, Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute, attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminar at NYU as a young man. He recently surprised and delighted a few of us by revealing that the line that he remembers Mises speaking most frequently in the seminar was “No farzer credit expansion!”  As a native German speaker with an accent and less than complete familiarity with English usage, what Mises meant to say, of course, was “No further credit expansion!” Upon hearing this, it struck me that Mises pithily summed up in four words a program for “stabilizing” the economy, that is, abolishing booms, bubbles, and recessions. Why the entire program could—and should—be printed on a T-shirt.