Ludwig von Mises was the greatest economist of the twentieth century, but often readers are reluctant to tackle his major works. They fear that they will be unable to follow that abstract and relentless theoretical progression of, e.g., Human Action and The Theory of Money and Credit. For readers like this, and for anyone else who admires Mises, The Quotable Mises is ideal.
It transpires that Mises had a rare gift. His economic analysis was often abstract, true enough; but he was able to express his ideas in clear and striking ways, often with epigrammatic force. The gift is all the more remarkable because English was not Mises’s native language.
The distinguished Austrian economist Mark Thornton has collected a large number of Mises’s comments, arranging them according to topics that range through the alphabet from “Action” to “Youth.”
As readers will discover, Mises again and again penetrates to the heart of an issue with a few words. He says, e.g., “What is lacking in the underdeveloped nations is not knowledge, but capital.” More generally, “There are no means by which the general standard of living can be raised other than by accelerating the increase of capital as compared with population.”
Mises’s insights often extend beyond the strictly economic. He says, “Plato was anxious to find a tyrant who would use his power for the realization of the Platonic ideal state. The question whether other people would like what he himself had in store for them never occurred to Plato. ” Mises remarks of Lenin that he was “as great a stranger to the work of the bourgeoisie as a Hottentot to the work of an explorer taking geographical measurements.”
Readers of The Quotable Mises will gain a grasp of the essential elements of Mises’s outlook on the world.
Mark Thornton is the Peterson-Luddy Chair in Austrian Economics and a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute. He is the book review editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, and has authored seven books and is a frequent guest on national radio shows.
Mises Institute Senior Fellow Mark Thornton joins Wall Street Bullion to discuss the outlook for gold and silver, the consequences of decades of monetary inflation, and the growing risks created by Federal Reserve policy and government debt. Thornton also explains why younger Americans are increasingly feeling the effects of the fiat-money system—and what a more resilient, bottom-up approach to protecting wealth might look like in the years ahead.
Mark Thornton explains how government intervention creates inequality, privileging protected industries and politically connected insiders while pushing costs onto everyone else.
Dr. Mark Thornton of the Mises Institute joins VRIC Media to discuss what may really be driving Federal Reserve policy—and why the Fed’s priorities may have far more to do with government debt, financial markets, and confidence in the dollar than simply controlling inflation.
Auburn, Al: Mises Institute, 2005
