Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page xii of Ryan Bourne’s February 2024 Introduction to The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions About Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy (Ryan A. Bourne, ed., 2024):

Blaming “corporate greed” and one-off supply shocks nevertheless became a prevailing narrative that obscured the role of monetary mismanagement in fostering inflation. Rather than tighten monetary and fiscal conditions, many political commentators urged the federal government to invest in expanding capacity in sectors suffering from bottlenecks, to use antitrust policy to make markets more competitive, or even to control prices directly – basically, anything other than deliver the monetary medicine for inflation that has been accepted among economists as the (at times painful) cure since the late 1970s.

DBx: Congratulations – and thanks – to Ryan Bourne for assembling this excellent collection of original papers on the role and importance of market prices, as well as on the folly of obstructing price movements. Today, May 14th, 2024, is this splendid book’s official release date.