by Joakim Book
Mises.org
If you asked him, Edward Chancellor wouldn’t say he’s particularly Austrian. Yet The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, the dense book he most timely published during the height of the inflation summer of 2022, is as obsessed with centrally planned interest rates as your average Misesian. Like many before him, and many in the Austrian camp, Chancellor identifies the many ills that trouble the world and locates their cause in a dysfunctional interest-rate regime.
In Chancellor’s own words, “The most important question addressed in this book is whether a capitalist economy can function properly without market-determined interest.” Most readers of these pages will automatically respond, no—free-market capitalism rests on an uninhibited market for capital and debt, and thus interest rates act as a rationing mechanism and guiding principle. The rest is just implementation, as Michael Malice might say.