Legendary free market economist Ludwig von Mises was definitely a maverick, a man who was ahead of his time and understood the virtues of capitalism and the dangers of central planning. Despite his work being published decades ago, you can still be surprised by how correct his warnings were and how much of a genius he really was.
Writing about monetary theory and policy, one couldn’t help but make the correlation to Mises’s explanation and United States President Donald Trump’s flirtation with a weak dollar policy in order to boost exports. Of course, greater inflation means those at home suffer.
Here is what Mises wrote:
“The country exports more than it did before, and it gets, as compensation for these increase exports, a smaller amount of foreign products. Exports are, as it were, subsidized and imports penalized to the burden of the natives. The inflation is, by and large, tantamount to a tax imposed upon the domestic consumers in order to cheapen the consumption of domestic products by foreigners.”
Trump and his economic advisors need to read more Mises and less Alexander Hamilton, a statist warmonger.
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