Austrian Economics Overview

This short chapter provides the link between Part II (Action Within the Framework of Society) and Part III (Economic Calculation) of the book.

In the present chapter, Mises argues that ideas control human destiny.

He is pretty old in 1969 but it is wonderful to hear his voice and he still seems sharp as a tack.

The customary terminology misrepresents these things entirely. The philosophy commonly called individualism is a philosophy of social cooperation and the progressive intensification of the social nexus.

A general rise in prices can only occur if there is either a drop in the supply of all commodities or an increase in the supply of money.

Changes in the originary rate of interest and in the amount of saving are — other things being equal — two aspects of the same phenomenon.

We must conceive that a man who does not prefer satisfaction within a nearer period would never achieve consumption and enjoyment at all.

The aim of the moral law is to impel individuals to adjust their conduct to the requirements of life in society to abstain from all acts detrimental to the preservation of peaceful social cooperation and to the improvement of interhuman relations.

Guido Hülsmann shows us in this monumental biography that a common view of Mises is mistaken.