This volume might be called the Mises Reader, for it contains a wide sampling of his academic essays on money, trade, and economic systems. Some of them, like “Observations on the Cooperative Movement,” have not been published previously. Others, like “The Idea of Liberty Is Western,” have already made their mark on intellectual history.
Brought together by Mrs. Mises after her husband’s death, and edited with an introduction by Richard Ebeling, this volume fills an important gap in providing an overview of Ludwig von Mises’s best academic work. For that reason, this book is already widely used in graduate courses and seminars on the resurgence of the Austrian School.
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 essay added later to the collection: a critique of proposals to nationalize banking and credit, weighing bureaucratic against profit management and warning of credit overexpansion and immobilization.
Mises’s focused analysis of price controls: why fixing prices produces shortages and demands for still more controls, and what that reveals for the theory of social organization as a whole.
How German “anti-Marxism,” including national (anti-Marxian) socialism, absorbed the very Marxian ideas it claimed to oppose, with Werner Sombart as the case study of a thinker Marxist and anti-Marxist by turns.
Dr. Richard M. Ebeling is a professor of economics at The Citadel. Among the courses he has taught are “Market Ethics in Modern Society” and “The Economics of Conflict.”
Richard M. Ebeling recalls the world of 1952, when socialism seemed ascendant everywhere, summarizes Marx’s system of historical materialism and class struggle, and introduces Mises as one of its most formidable critics.
In the wilderness of the New World, the Plymouth Pilgrims had progressed from the false dream of communism to the sound realism of capitalism.
Biden's spending plan is presumed to be costless, because it will not increase the national debt and since it will be paid for by imposing $2.1 trillion of higher taxes on those designated as "rich."
Selected by Margit von Mises and edited with an introduction by Richard M. Ebeling. Auburn, Ala: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990.
Selected by Margit von Mises and edited with an introduction by Richard M. Ebeling. Auburn, Ala: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, Norwell, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990.
