Speaking at an IMF sponsored event, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen warned of growing risk factors in several asset classes. Unfortunately, she doesn’t see the most aggressive monetary policy in American history as the cause.
Introduction by Ludwig von Mises (1920)
There are many socialists who have never come to grips in any way with the problems of economics, and who have made no attempt at all to form for themselves any clear conception of the conditions which determine the character of human society. There are others, who have probed deeply into the economic history of the past and present, and striven, on this basis, to construct a theory of economics of the “bourgeois” society.
Foreword
The twentieth century has witnessed the beginning, development, and end of the most tragic experiment in human history: socialism. The experiment resulted in tremendous human losses, destruction of potentially rich economies, and colossal ecological disasters. The experiment has ended, but the devastation will affect the lives and health of generations to come.
The real tragedy of this experiment is that Ludwig von Mises and his followers—among the best economic minds of this century—had exposed the truth about socialism in 1920, yet their warnings went unheeded.
Introduction to 1990 Edition
Ludwig von Mises’s seminal refutation of socialist economics, republished here, was written seventy years ago, but it is a description of the “real socialism” of today—or rather yesterday. Mises’s thesis is that in a socialist economy rational economic calculation is impossible; its attempts to allocate resources efficiently in the absence of private ownership of the means of production must fail. The East Bloc’s disastrous experience with socialism has shown the world that Mises was correct all along.
Further to Joe Salerno’s post on “Hayek and the Intellectuals,” it’s worth adding that Hayek was not alone in thinking of the intellectual class as naturally hostile to the market economy.
3. Liberal Foreign Policy
2. The Right of Self-Determination
It has already been pointed out that a country can enjoy domestic peace only when a democratic constitution provides the guarantee that the adjustment of the government to the will of the citizens can take place without friction. Nothing else is required than the consistent application of the same principle in order to assure international peace as well.
1. The Boundaries of the State
For the liberal, there is no opposition between domestic policy and foreign policy, and the question so often raised and exhaustively discussed, whether considerations of foreign policy take precedence over those of domestic policy or vice versa, is, in his eyes, an idle one. For liberalism is, from the very outset, a world-embracing political concept, and the same ideas that it seeks to realize within a limited area it holds to be valid also for the larger sphere of world politics.
2. Liberal Economic Pollicy
