Economic Calculation

What economic calculation requires is a monetary system whose functioning is not sabotaged by government interference.

Human Action, p. 225; pp. 223–24

The endeavors to expand the quantity of money in circulation either in order to increase the government’s capacity to spend or in order to bring about a temporary lowering of the rate of interest disintegrate all currency matters and derange economic calculation.

Human Action, p. 225; p. 224

Admittedly, monetary calculation has its inconveniences and serious defects, but we have certainly nothing better to put in its place, and for the practical purposes of life monetary calculation as it exists under a sound monetary system always suffices. Were we to dispense with it, any economic system of calculation would become absolutely impossible.

Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, p. 25

Economic calculation can only take place by means of money prices established in the market for production goods in a society resting on private property in the means of production.

Socialism, p. 123

Without the aid of monetary calculation, bookkeeping, and the computation of profit and loss in terms of money, technology would have had to confine itself to the simplest, and therefore the least productive, methods.

Epistemological Problems of Economics, p. 157

Monetary calculation is not the calculation, and certainly not the measurement, of value. Its basis is the comparison of the more important and the less important. It is an ordering according to rank, an act of grading, and not an act of measuring.

Epistemological Problems of Economics, p. 160