Government Against the Economy

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek wrote of this book, "I know no other place where the crucial issues are explained as clearly and convincingly as in this book."

In 1979, at the height of the energy crisis, George Reisman set out to explain how price controls, not greedy merchants, were the reason for the shortage and the gas-line calamity. The result was The Government Against the Economy, which remains one of the greatest books on price controls and its effects ever written. Reisman, of course, was a student of Ludwig von Mises's, and is a master expositor of the Misesian theory of price and money.

His analysis is patient and thorough, as he traces out the effects of price controls on sector after sector. He shows how the government makes itself the enemy of every American by distorting pricing signals to the point where producers can no longer profit from providing services. He integrates his analysis with monetary analytics to show how inflation can lead to all-around economic planning.

This book was later turned into three of twenty chapters of Reisman's magisterial book Capitalism, and yet it remains enormously valuable on its own. It is integrated, systematic, and ultimately devastating. The Mises Institute has brought it back as an essential guide to explaining how it is that energy crises come about and how government intervention can only make them worse.

Henry Hazlitt himself adored this book: "This is one of the most powerful and convincing books I know. Its explanations are brilliantly clear; its analyses are lethal; it is uncompromising. Readers who come to it without any previous knowledge of basic economic theory will find it a luminous introduction. If any book can slow down the economic destructionsim of our age, this could be it."