2. Resource-Using Activities: Government Ownership versus Private Ownership
The bulk of government activities use resources, redirecting factors of production to government-chosen ends. These activities generally involve the real or supposed supply of services by government to some or all of the populace. Government functions here as an owner and enterpriser.
Mises Daily Tuesday by Benjamin Wiegold:
The US, Russia, Canada, Denmark, and other states are racing to take control of the Arctic Ocean. Outside of a few tiny outposts, however, these states have never “homesteaded” the region, so their claims of true ownership are fanciful at best.
Economic historians of the 21st Century will undoubtedly be puzzled by the reception accorded to economic theorists of the 20th Century. They will be particularly puzzled by what occurred in the span of years between World War I and 1970.
(Reprinted from The Mont Pelerin Quarterly, Volume III, October 1961, No. 3, page 20f.)
The period between the two wars from 1918 to the occupation by Hitler was for Austria and especially for Vienna a sad epoch from the political and economic standpoint. One calamity followed the other: Collapse of the traditional frame of the new Austria – of the old Austria-Hungarian Monarchy – , war exhaustions and destruction, high inflation, brief revival followed by deep depression, civil war on two fronts and then the dark night of Nazi rule and again war, destruction and occupation.
Mr. Chairman, Professor von Mises, Ladies and Gentlemen. There has not been, and I don’t expect that there ever will be in my life, another occasion when I have felt so honored and pleased to be allowed to stand up and to express on behalf of all those here assembled, and of hundreds of others, the profound admiration and gratitude we feel for a great scholar and a great man.
I am sorry that a combination of causes — geography, my busy schedule and no less my age — make it impossible for me to attend this gathering. If I were able to be present, I would have said a few words on Professor Hayek and his achievements. As conditions are, I have to put these remarks in writing and am grateful to our friends who will present them for me.
(Reprinted by courtesy of Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly, October 1, 1973 issue, and with permission of Dr. Henry Hazlitt.)
Last Saturday marked the 92nd birthday of Ludwig von Mises, the greatest analytical economist of his generation. He has also been one of this century’s ablest champions of private enterprise and the free market.
[Extract consisting of first four paragraphs in article entitled, “How Mises Changed My Mind,” reprinted from The Mont Pelerin Quarterly, Volume III, October 1961, No. 3, page 16.]
A generation of students at New York University’s graduate business school who took the economics courses of Ludwig von Mises remember a gentle, diminutive soft spoken, white-haired European scholar– with a mind like a steel trap.
September 29, 1981, is the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, economist and social philosopher, who passed away in 1973. Von Mises was my teacher and mentor and the source or inspiration for most of what I know and consider to be important and worthwhile in these fields of what enables me to understand the events shaping the world in which we live. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to him, because I believe that he deserves to occupy a major place in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.
