History of the Austrian School of Economics

In this short biographical entry on Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard recounts a great man's life and work and explains his significance to the world of ideas and the history of his time and ours.

The idea of private property not only agrees with our moral intuitions—it is the sole just solution to the problem of social order.

The fact that I could take exception to some of Mises's teaching does not make me an apostate. It should prove, instead, that the great teacher had produced students with open and critical minds. 

Left-wing intellectuals such as Polanyi are always weeping about the "Coca-Colaization" of the rest of the world, bemoaning the supposedly lost glories of "folk culture" in the undeveloped countries, writes Rothbard.

Menger's was an analytical method that began with the smallest empirical phenomena and proceeded logically from there. He called this the "empirical method."

Frédéric Bastiat reminds us of the dangers to all sides of using military force as a means of securing resources or to bring freedom to foreign peoples.

Man discovered the value of free markets, free competition, and free enterprise. But then the governments man created to "protect" these rights destroyed them instead. 

The uneasiness that impels a man to act is caused by a dissatisfaction with expected future conditions as they would probably develop if nothing were done to alter them.

For a while the postwar ideological climate seemed to be the same as during the war: internationalism, statism, adulation of economic planning and the centralized state, were rampant everywhere.

One must not forget that the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals.