America’s Great Depression Audiobook (Free)

Applied Austrian economics doesn’t get better than this. Murray N. Rothbard’s America’s Great Melancholy is definitely a staple of modern economic books and important for understanding a pivotal event in American and world history.

Rothbard opens with a theoretical treatment of business cycle theory, showing how an expansive monetary plan generates imbalances between expense and consumption. He proceeds to examine the Fed’s procedures of the 1920s, demonstrating that it was quite inflationary also about America’s Great Melancholy if the effects did not arrive in the price of goods and solutions. The stock-market modification was merely one indicator of the expenditure increase that led inevitably to a bust.

The Great Unhappiness was not an emergency for capitalism but simply an example of the downturn area of the business cycle, which in turn was generated by government intervention throughout the market. Had this book appeared in the 1940s, it might have spared the world much grief. Even so, its appearance in 1963 meant that free-market advocates experienced their first full-scale treatment of this crucial subject matter. The damage to the intellectual world inflicted by Keynesian- and socialist-style treatments will be limited from that day time forward.

Since the book’s first edition, it has been the definitive treatment of the sources of the depression. It continues to be canonical today because the debate is still very alive.