Why is the boom-and-bust cycle so persistent? Why did economists fail to predict the recent economic meltdown--or to pull us out of the crisis more quickly? And how can we prevent future calamities?

Mainstream economics has no adequate answers for these pressing questions. In the powerful and eye-opening new book It Didn't Have to Be This Way, Harry Veryser shows how the Austrian School of economic provides the proper alternative to the failed interventionist approach: liberty, private property, and the unhampered market.