Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Douglas French and Jeffrey Tucker, President and Editorial Vice President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, respectively, for originally suggesting the idea for this book and for their moral support and encouragement—and forbearance—during its preparation. I am especially thankful to the donors of the Mises Institute whose generous support has made the publication of this volume a reality. My greatest intellectual debt is to my dear friend and mentor Murray Rothbard. Throughout his brilliant career he was an articulate, courageous, and intransigent proponent of sound money. Of course, Mises and Hayek also profoundly influenced my thinking, and I learned much from the works of William H. Hutt, Henry Hazlitt, Hans Sennholz, Jacques Rueff, Michael Heilperin, Wilhelm Röpke, and Benjamin Anderson. All were fearless and outspoken advocates of sound money during the high tide of Keynesianism.

I am indebted to my many colleagues who have read and commented on various drafts of these essays and whose articles and books in the sound money paradigm have taught and inspired me over the years. Although far too numerous for me to properly acknowledge here, they include Walter Block, William Butos, John Cochran, Roger Garrison, Jeffrey Herbener, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jesús Huerta de Soto, Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Antony Mueller, Gary North, George Reisman, Pascal Salin, the late Larry Sechrest, the late Sudha Shenoy, Frank Shostak, Mark Thornton, Lawrence H. White, and, of course, the polymathic David Gordon. I am especially grateful to Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. founder and Chairman of the Mises Institute who has steadfastly supported and encouraged all of my writing projects and has provided an institutional home for the modern sound money movement. Several of the essays collected in this book were presented as papers at New York University Colloquium on Market Institutions and Economic Processes (formerly, the Austrian Economics Colloquium), and I thank its members for their cogent suggestions and criticisms. Last but not least, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Helen and Michael Salerno, who suffered through my long absences, periods of distraction, and occasional irritability while these essays were being written. This is a debt that cannot easily be repaid.