Chapter 5: On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics
Chapter 6: Further Implications of the Neglect of Economic Thinking
Chapter 7: The Epistemological Roots of Monism
Chapter 8: Positivism and the Crisis of Western Civilization
1. The Permanent Substratum of Epistemology
Πάντα ερί, everything is in a ceaseless flux, says Heraclitus; there is no permanent being; all is change and becoming. It must be left to metaphysical speculation to deal with the problems whether this proposition can be borne out from the point of view of a superhuman intelligence and furthermore whether it is possible for a human mind to think of change without implying the concept of a substratum that, while it changes, remains in some regard and sense constant in the succession of its various states.
2. The Nature of Intervention
The problem of interventionism must not be confused with that of socialism. We are not dealing here with the question of whether or not socialism in any form is conceivable or realizable. We are not here seeking an answer to the question of whether human society can be built on public property in the means of production. The problem at hand is, What are the consequences of government and other interventions in the private property order? Can they achieve the result they are supposed to achieve?
A precise definition of the concept “intervention” is now in order.
Foreword by Margit von Mises
My husband wrote the essays in this book in the early 1920s, more than fifty years ago. They were collected and published as an anthology in 1929 by Gustav Fischer, formerly in Jena, now in Stuttgart, under the title Kritik des Interventionismus. Although these articles deal with the economic problems of that day, the same problems are still with us, perhaps in an even more serious and menacing way than ever.
Introduction by Hans F. Sennholz
We may grow in knowledge of truth, but its great principles are forever the same. The economic principles that Ludwig von Mises expounded in these six essays during the 1920s have endured the test of time, being as valid today as they were in the past. Surely, the names and places have changed, but the inescapable interdependence of market phenomena is the same today, during the 1970s, as it was during the 1920s, and as valid for present-day Americans as it was for the Germans of the Weimar Republic.
Interventionism
1. Interventionism as an Economic System
Ever since the Bolshevists abandoned their attempt to realize the socialist ideal of a social order all at once in Russia and, instead, adopted the New Economic Policy, or NEP, the whole world has had only one real system of economic policy: interventionism.1 Some of its followers and advocates are thinking of it as a temporary system that is
