A dollar is a dollar—or so most of us believe. Indeed, it is part of the ideology of our time that money is a single, impersonal instrument that impoverishes social life by reducing relations to cold, hard cash. After all, it's just money. Or is it? Distinguished social scientist and prize-winning author Viviana Zelizer argues against this conventional wisdom. She shows how people have invented their own forms of currency, earmarking money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporating funds into webs of friendship and family relations, and otherwise varying the process by which spending and saving takes place. Zelizer concentrates on domestic transactions, bestowals of gifts and charitable donations in order to show how individuals, families, governments, and businesses have all prescribed social meaning to money in ways previously unimagined.

The great monopoly in this country is money. So long as that exists, our old variety and individual energy of development are out of the question. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.

Published by Liberty Fund for the first time in English, "On the Manipulation of Money and Credit" consists primarily of three pieces on monetary theory written by Ludwig von Mises between 1923 and 1931. As a precursor to Human Action, Mises's magnum opus, this volume includes some of his most important contributions to trade-cycle theory. The first essay, "Stabilization of the Monetary Unit from the Viewpoint of Theory" written in 1923 during a period of German hyperinflation, discusses the consequences of the fluctuating purchasing power of paper money and explores such ideas as the outcome of inflation, that is, the result of the increase in the amount of money, and an emancipation of monetary value from the influence of government. Written in 1928, the second essay, "Monetary Stabilization and Cyclical Policy" critiques schemes for stabilising prices and for "measuring" purchasing power. The third selection is a speech Mises gave in 1931, "The Causes of the Economic Crisis". It explores the nature and role of the market and cyclical changes in business conditions.

The debasement of coinage, particularly of silver, was a common feature of pre-modern monetary systems. Most coinages were issued by state authorities and the condition of a coinage is often seen (rightly or wrongly) as an indicator of the broader fiscal health of the state that produced it. While in some cases the motives behind the debasements or reductions in standards are clear, in many cases the intentions of the issuing authorities are uncertain. Various explanations have been advanced: fiscal motives (such as a desire to profit or a to cover a deficit caused by the failure to balance expenditure and revenues); monetary motives (such as changing demand for coined money or a desire to maintain monetary stability in the face of changing values of raw materials or labour costs); pressure from groups within society that would profit from debasement; misconduct at the mint; or the decline of existing monetary standards due to circulation and wear of the coinage in circulation. Certain explanations have tended to gain favour with monetary historians of specific periods, partly reflecting the compartmentalization of scholarship. Thus the study of Roman debasements emphasizes fiscal deficits, whereas medievalists are often more prepared to consider monetary factors as contributing to debasements. To some extent these different approaches are a reflection of discrepancies in the amount of documentary evidence available for the respective periods, but the divide also underlines fundamentally different approaches to the function of coinage: Romanists have preferred to see coins as a medium for state payments; whereas medievalists have often emphasized exchange as an important function of currency. The volume is inter-disciplinary in scope. Apart from bringing together monetary historians of different periods, it also contains contributions from archaeometallurgists who have experience with the chemical and physical composition of coins and technical aspects of production of base alloys

This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked.

The Church and the Market is a vigorous and lively defense of the market economy and a withering attack on all forms of state intervention. It covers labor unions, monopoly, money and banking, business cycles, interest, usury, and much more. Although it makes a particular point of noting the moral arguments of the market economy and that Catholics are of course perfectly at liberty to support it, its audience is much broader than Catholics alone. Readers of all religious traditions and none at all have praised The Church and the Market, first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards, as one of the most compelling and persuasive defenses of capitalism against its critics ever written.