Welfare, Freedom and Inflation, by Wilhelm Roepke (University of Alabama, $2.95). These four short essays, written in 1957 or so and published originally, I believe, in German newspapers, provide an excellent sample of Roepke’s method and style of economic discourse. The text would be useful as an introduction for those who don’t know his work; for those who do, it is not without gems, such as Roepke’s passage on the ultimate roots of the inflationary process, which, he says, we do not discover “until we recognize that inflation, and the spirit which nourishes it and accepts it, is merely the monetary aspect of the general decay of law. It requires no special astuteness to realize that the vanishing respect for property is very intimately related to the numbing of respect for the integrity of money and its value. In fact, laxity about property and laxity about money are very closely bound up together; in both cases what is firm, durable, earned, secured and designed for continuity gives place to what is fragile, fugitive, fleeting, unsure and ephemeral. And that is not the kind of foundation on which the free society can long remain standing.”
W. F. RICKENBACKER
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