Margit von Mises introduces the collection, recalling that these essays date from the 1920s and noting that the final essay was added to the later German edition.
A Critique of Interventionism
Between capitalism and socialism, is there a stable middle way? In these six essays from the 1920s, translated by Hans F. Sennholz, Ludwig von Mises argues there is not. Writing as government intervention was becoming the reigning policy of Europe and America, he shows that isolated measures like price ceilings and minimum wages fail on their own terms: a controlled price empties the shelves, and each intervention calls forth the next, until the economy is either freed or fully socialized. Along the way Mises takes on the German “Socialists of the Chair,” traces how a self-styled “anti-Marxism” absorbed the very ideas it claimed to oppose, and weighs proposals to nationalize credit. The result is one of his sharpest cases for economic law—and against the interventionist state.
Hans F. Sennholz, the translator, lays out Mises’s target—the belief in a “third system” of a hampered market economy standing between capitalism and socialism—and why that middle way cannot hold.
Mises’s 1929 preface, written in Vienna for the original German edition, presenting the essays as a sustained critique of interventionism, then the reigning economic policy across Europe and America.
The central essay: interventionism as a supposed economic system, the real nature of intervention, and how price ceilings, minimum wages, and similar measures defeat their own aims—leaving only a choice between the free market and socialism.
Mises examines the doctrine of a “hampered” or regulated market as a distinct third system and answers Schmalenbach’s thesis that free enterprise was giving way to a bound economy.
A critique of the German “Socialists of the Chair” and their social policy—by way of the Methodenstreit, the clash of control versus economic law, and Max Weber—showing how “social liberalism” abandons liberalism itself.
How German “anti-Marxism,” including national (anti-Marxian) socialism, absorbed the very Marxian ideas it claimed to oppose, with Werner Sombart as the case study of a thinker Marxist and anti-Marxist by turns.
Mises’s focused analysis of price controls: why fixing prices produces shortages and demands for still more controls, and what that reveals for the theory of social organization as a whole.
The essay added later to the collection: a critique of proposals to nationalize banking and credit, weighing bureaucratic against profit management and warning of credit overexpansion and immobilization.
