Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 512-513 of F.A. Hayek’s June 13th, 1980, letter-to-the-editor of the Times, as this letter is reprinted in Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek (footnote deleted; link added):

From the technical point of view there is no serious difficulty about stopping inflation. As the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Arthur Burns, has recently confirmed in a much noticed lecture, the monetary authority can always stop inflation “with little delay“. The difficulties are not economic but political and especially problems of government finance. Ending inflation demands that government is deprived of the recourse to the printing press for financing its expenditures. Government must balance its budget and I admit that it is not humanly possible to do so overnight.