In “Liberty and Property,” Mises demonstrates how poverty, starvation, disease, and serfdom dominated the pre-capitalist ages, and how the market brought liberation for the masses of men. Socialism, in contrast, embodies hatred for liberty and prosperity.
In “Middle-of-the-Road Policy,” Mises lays out his theory that interventionism breeds on itself: one bad policy leads to another unless laissez-faire is restored and adhered to over time.
Contains an excellent forward by Thomas DiLorenzo.
Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that he called praxeology.
The crucial difference between physical “capital goods” and “capital” as an accounting concept, and how profit and loss, private property, and economic calculation steer production toward what consumers actually want.
How the Industrial Revolution and foreign investment made some nations rich while others stayed poor, closing with Mises’s defense of capitalism.
Why Marxism spread so widely while going long unchallenged, how its slogans slipped into everyday speech, and the Marxian urge to “organize” society by treating individuals as raw material to be arranged.
Mises Institute: 1991
