Thirty years ago, President Bill Clinton, of all people, declared, “The era of big government is over.” It is now clear that his requiem for statism was a tad premature. Government is bigger than ever.
An increasing number of people perceive that the American Dream is out of reach. For many, obtaining the bare necessities is increasingly unaffordable compared to a couple of years ago. Our rulers, supported by a growing segment of the intellectual class, have taken leave of their economic senses. Either that or they just don’t care. They would rather worship power than submit to truth, justice, and economic law.
The wisdom of the past often provides the clarity we need for the present. Reading the great scholars of earlier generations helps us better understand the challenges of today. To that end, the Mises Institute approached me to compile a primer of Mises’s writings, Why Mises Matters Today. This book will be for people who, perhaps, know very little of Mises’s thought or find Human Action too daunting. Here they will be able to read not what someone says about Mises, but Mises’s own ideas in his own words.
I am honored an humbled at the same time. I edited The Mises Reader in 2016, and have dedicated my career to teaching the foundations of the Austrian tradition, so I am a true and devoted student of Ludwig von Mises.
I am preparing the book now and expect it to be ready in early 2027.
The purpose of Why Mises Matters Today is to present the full spectrum of Mises’s ideas about economics and the free society using his more accessible, more popular works to that everyone can benefit. The book will contain the essence of Mises on human action, praxeology, the division of labor and human civilization, the market and economic calculation, money, monetary theory and business cycles, economic progress, income inequality, socialism, and interventionism, in ways that anyone can understand without specialized training.
Mises’s classics such as “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism,” “Wages, Unemployment, and Inflation,” and “Lord Keynes and Say’s Law” will be included. The reader will even find an essay in which Mises provides a bit of retrospective of his early career and explains why he wrote his great Human Action.
There will also be an English translation of an earlier work he wrote in German, “The Myth of the Failure of Capitalism.”
I even found an essay written in 1951, reprinted in 1990, that was not widely circulated, but is timely today and worthy of inclusion in this volume. “Inflation: How Government Generates It and Then Endeavors to Shift Responsibility,” is an essay for our current moment if ever there was one.
Interventionism, socialism, and progressivism can be vanquished with the aid of economic truth. Imagine the benefit to our society if Mises’s solutions to our economic and social problems were internalized in the minds of our young people instead of those of Marx and Keynes. Imagine the seismic positive shift if our culture embraced the work of Mises rather than the bumper sticker fallacies of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or the talking heads of the media establishment.
Today’s debates are not new. Mises’s perspective, depth, and principles are just as pertinent now as when he first set them down. He remains relevant because truth does not expire. Now more than ever, we need solid economic counsel in clear, straightforward prose that everyone can understand, internalize, and apply. We need zeal, yes, but not zeal without knowledge. We need Mises!
In a day and age in which both the Right and Left are fighting for their versions of statism, we need the ideas of Mises to show that there is a true alternative to identity politics, class warfare, the welfare-warfare state, and economic and social tyranny. That alternative, of course, is liberty.
The ideas of Mises need to be shouted far and wide, so Why Mises Matters Today will not be for sale, but given away. We’ll print 100,000 copies of this book and ship them to anyone who requests a copy. We’ll send copies to student groups across the country, too. Mises’s ideas will be heard on campuses, even if his name isn’t mentioned in a classroom.
To do this, we need your help covering the costs of editing, printing, and getting the book into the hands of thousands of new and old readers. Anyone who donates $500 or more by December 31 will be listed in the book as a Patron. Anyone who donates $5 or more will receive an advance complimentary PDF of Mises’s essay from 1951, “Inflation: How Government Generates It and Then Endeavors to Shift Responsibility.”
Getting these ideas out there requires a lot of resources, and we appreciate any support you can give. No amount of support is too small in this ideological war of ideas. Please contribute today!
Shawn Ritenour
Mises Institute Senior Fellow
Professor of Economics, Grove City College
