In case you missed it (I did the first time around so a HT Pete Boettke and Jeff Tucker): Art Carden at Forbes on “The Greatest Thinker You’ve Never Read: Ludwig von Mises.”
Highlights:
One of the wonders of the modern world is that his major contributions are available to be perused or downloaded from the institute bearing his name [Ludwig von Mises Institute] or from the Liberty Fund. Today, anyone with access to an internet connection can access his works with little or no trouble. Anyone with a USB drive can carry his greatest works on a keychain….
Mises’s arguments, and the arguments of those who have followed him, do not merely undermine arguments for pure, global socialism. They also undermine arguments for interventionism more generally.
Unfortunately, the people who most need to read Mises probably won’t. In this light, I can close with nothing better than the sober warning Mises offers in the last few sentences of Human Action:
The body of economic knowledge is an essential element in the structure of human civilization; it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and all the moral, intellectual, technological, and therapeutical achievements of the last centuries have been built. It rests with men whether they will make the proper use of the rich treasure with which this knowledge provides them or whether they will leave it unused. But if they fail to take the best advantage of it and disregard its teachings and warnings, they will not annul economics; they will stamp out society and the human race.
