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 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.
Mises Institute: 1991
