上世纪二、三十年代，以米塞斯和哈耶克为一方，以兰格等社会主义计划手段的支持者为另一方，就社会主义经济计算之可能性展开了一场意义深远的大辩论。奥地利学派的思想家们卓越的理论洞识，推动了新的分析工具的形成，在学科内外都产生了广泛、深刻的影响。如今应该没有多少人还会怀疑这一结 论：中央计划经济不能解决资源的合理配置问题。然而在经济问题频现的时代，或对于在发展中的转型国家，政府的经济刺激措施、宏观干预政策仍屡屡回潮，对这场论辩做出全面的评估仍是十分必要的。
本书是当代奥地利学派经济学的重要著作，是对米塞斯企业家才能理论和哈耶克知识理论的拓展和应用。德索托完整地回顾了论辩始末，并对兰格的思想历程进行了详尽的考察和批判性研究。他揭示了各种形式的国家干预主义的危害，并深刻地指出“自由”、“道德”与“效率”的内在一致性，认为“对企业家才能的抑制，将阻碍经济计算所需的信息的产生，从而将导致社会的失调”。

Matthew Boulton was an eighteenth-century designer, inventor, and industrialist, a consummate businessman, and co-founder of the influential Lunar Society. Now, on the bicentenary of his death, this book surveys his life and extraordinarily varied achievements. The book explains how Boulton, a Birmingham 'toy'-maker producing buttons, buckles and silverware, went into business with James Watt and exported Boulton & Watt steam engines all over the world.Meanwhile his magnificent ormolu ornaments decorated aristocratic drawing rooms, and his determination to discourage counterfeiters led to a contract to manufacture British coinage and coins of other countries at his mint. Boulton was leader of the campaign to establish the Birmingham Assay Office (still the busiest in the country), and also at the heart of the Lunar Society, a group of prominent industrialists, natural philosophers, and intellectuals interested in scientific and social change. A friend of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood and many others, Boulton was a fascinating man, Britain's leading Enlightenment entrepreneur.