The second volume of Emil Sax's "Die Verkehrsmittel in Volks- und Staatswirthschaft" (The Means of Transport in the National and State Economy; Vienna 1879) is devoted entirely to railways. Sax first examines how steam locomotion transforms economy and society: the cheapening of transport, the levelling of prices of agricultural products, the shifting of the Thünen production zones, and effects on ground rent, mining, industry and trade. A second section deals with the administration of the railway system and sets out at length why the railway should be withdrawn from purely private economy and conceived as an object of communal economy; in doing so it refutes the various forms of competition theory as well as the contested question of state versus private railways. The third section develops the economics of construction and operation, including the tariff system, value-based tariff-setting and differential tariffs. The fourth gives an overview of the history of the development of the railway system in the principal states. The exposition argues deductively from the general laws of transport set out in the first volume and relies throughout on statistical material and the contemporary specialist literature.
The work is the first part of Julius v. Gans-Ludassy's three-part system of economic energy and treats economistic methodology, that is, the question of how economic knowledge is possible at all. The author construes economics as an independent science, one to be detached from philosophy, and grounds it on the principle of purposiveness, which he calls economic energy. In twelve chapters he develops its construction out of philosophy, a critical history of the methodological schools (rationalism, empiricism, historicism, the exact-realist current), and works through the economic phenomenon, the concept, the judgement, inference, the law, the law of development, the principle, and systematics. Against purely abstract as well as purely empirical methods he sets a rational empiricism, and explicitly sets himself apart from Menger, Eisenhart, Dilthey, and Wagner, on whose works he builds. Jena 1893.
OriginalDeutsch
1893
The Crash Is Inevitable. Governments Will Create Money to Delay It
Original title·Le krach est inévitable. Les gouvernements créeront de la monnaie pour le retarder
The work examines the emergence and conditions of existence of small trades and cottage industry in Austria and is divided into two parts. The general part traces how the putting-out industry develops out of home production, wage-work and handicraft under commercial-capitalist direction: either derived from existing forms of enterprise or established anew in its own right, in the countryside as in the city. Schwiedland describes the dependence of the contracted masters and resident journeymen on the putter-out, and the plight of the independent small master, beset by the factory, by commerce and by his own lack of capital. The special part is a monograph on the Viennese shell-turners (the mother-of-pearl button industry): raw material, the legal framework of the craft, booms and crises since the McKinley Tariff, the situation of masters, apprentices and journeymen, as well as the cottage industry. The argument draws on official reports, inquiries and statistical tables from Vienna, Berlin and Paris. Published in 1894.
OriginalDeutsch
1894
Aims and Methods of Theoretical Political Economy at the Present Time
Original title·Ziele und Wege der Theoretischen Nationalökonomie in der Gegenwart
Frank Fetter, in this dissertation submitted at Halle in 1894, examines the principle of population of Thomas Robert Malthus and sets against it his own voluntarist theory of population. The first section is a conceptual critique: Fetter shows that Malthus uses the key terms "tendency", "population" and "principle" ambiguously, and thereby illegitimately compares a psychological drive with a measurable number of people; the geometric and arithmetic progression, together with the proposition that population always stands at the level of the food supply, are rejected. The second section analyses statistics from several countries on the number of marriages, the age at marriage and the number of children, and attributes the lower number of children among wealthier classes to prudence and standards of living rather than to physiological causes. In the third section Fetter interprets the movement of population as the resultant of many producing and consuming groups, whose behaviour is determined by the "standard of life" and by motives of the will, and from this derives practical measures: general education, the promotion of voluntary savings banks, a broader distribution of property. Methodologically he applies marginal utility theory to the population question and opposes both the "iron law of wages" and the fatalism of Malthusianism.
The Exploitation of Theories of Value in the Discussion of the Standard of Deferred Payments, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
In this polemic, published in 1896, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk examines whether the posthumously published third volume of Marx's Capital resolves the contradiction announced in the first volume: that goods exchange according to the labour embodied in them, while capitals of equal size yield equal profit. Böhm-Bawerk first reviews the Marxian theory of value and surplus value as well as the theory of prices of production, then dissects four arguments by which Marx asserts the continued validity of the law of value, and concludes that the third volume disavows the first. In the fourth section he traces the error to a purely dialectical derivation of the labour theory of value, cut off from experience and psychological analysis. A closing section engages critically with Werner Sombart's attempt at rescue, which interprets Marxian value as a mere conceptual fact.
Memorandum on the Establishment of a School of Commerce in Vienna in Lasting Commemoration of This Year's Jubilee of the Reign of His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty Emperor Franz Joseph I. 1898.
Original title·Promemoria über die Errichtung einer Handelshochschule in Wien zu dauernder Erinnnerung an das diesjährige Regierungs-Jubiläum seiner K. u. K. Apostolischen Majestät des Kaisers Franz Joseph I. 1898.
"Der goldene Boden" (The Golden Ground) is a Viennese Volksstück (popular play) in four acts by Julius von Gans-Ludassy, published in 1902; according to the preface, its performance was repeatedly banned by the Vienna censors. It portrays the misery of home-based work in the tailoring trade: the impoverished widower Peter Wimmer scrapes by as a piecework tailor, while the cutter Tichtl, who has worked his way up, simultaneously arranges a marriage for him to the older Agnes and seduces his daughter Leni. An intrigue revolves around Tichtl's post as manager, at the end of which the factory owner Brandstätter is stabbed to death; the jealous Spindelmann is the culprit, yet suspicion falls on Tichtl. Wimmer, who knows the truth and is bound by a sworn promise, is torn between revenge, compassion for his daughter, and his conscience. The play treats social exploitation, honour, and poverty in the milieu of the Viennese suburbs.
OriginalDeutsch
1898
On the Subject of the Theory of Value, in Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung
Original title·Vom Gegenstand der Wertlehre, in Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung
The Improvement of Our System of Township Poor Relief (Report of the committee on public relief of the poor in Indiana, Frank A. Fetter, Chairman). Indiana State Board of Charities Bulletin
The work examines the economic and social situation of the putting-out or domestic industry and asks by what means of legislation, self-help and administration the situation of home workers can be improved. By way of introduction, Schwiedland defines the origin, forms and concept of putting-out work and describes the favoured position of the putter-out in relation to the master craftsman and the factory owner. The main part discusses individual measures in twelve sections: registration, extension of compulsory insurance, sanitary policing, licensing of workplaces, organization of the workers, worker protection, abolition of home work, restriction of sales, labour exchanges, central workshops, immigration restriction and binding minimum wages. Throughout, the author draws on experiences from England, Switzerland, North America and especially the Australian colonies of Victoria and New Zealand, and examines their transferability to Austria. Appendices provide statistical overviews, a survey of the special legislation and an account of the central workshops.
Address on the Occasion of the Ceremonial Session Marking the Tenth Anniversary of the Society for the Promotion of German Science, Art and Literature in Bohemia
Original title·Ansprache anlässlich der Festsitzung zum zehnjährigen Bestand der Gesellschaft zur Förderung deutscher Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur in Böhmen
Subsidies—by the Committee on the Division of Work between Public and Private Charities, Frank A. Fetter, Chairman, National Conference of Charities and Corrections Proceedings
The work, published in 1902 as a Viennese dissertation in political science, traces the development of the relationship between manorial lords and peasants in Galicia from the territory's passing to Austria at the first partition of Poland (1772) to the land emancipation (1848). Mises first reconstructs the rural order of Polish Galicia (subjection, seigneurial authority, rights of possession, labour services) and contrasts the inactivity of the Polish state with the interventionist Austrian one. At its core is an account of the Theresian and Josephinian reforms, the abolition of serfdom, the Robot Patents, and the failed tax and urbarial regulation of 1789, followed by the reaction in the post-Josephinian period. The peasant uprising of 1846 and the abolition of all robot obligations, which was finally decreed in 1848, are treated at length. The study draws throughout on archival records and contemporary legislation; in its concluding discussion Mises interprets the emancipation of the peasants not in natural-law terms but as the consequence of an economic order that had become incompatible with population growth.
OriginalDeutsch
1902
Original title·Die Organisation der Heimarbeiterinnen
In this Viennese study of 1902, Eugen Schwiedland examines the question of how female home workers can be organised into trade unions. His starting point is the 1896 inquiry into women's labour, whose grievances became visible without any practical consequences being drawn from them. Schwiedland sets out why home workers in particular are so difficult to organise: the crowding into the occupation, the burden of the family, the security of the husband's wage, and the low skill level of the work. Since self-help and Social Democracy fail here, he considers two routes of assistance from outside: legal compulsion (citing Brentano and the German Trade Regulation Act) and civic assistance from bourgeois society. As a model, he describes at length a Berlin trade association of home workers with nearly 1,000 members, complete with legal protection, a savings bank, the supply of sewing machines, and sociable gatherings. In conclusion, he recommends founding a similar neutral trade union for Vienna.
OriginalDeutsch
1902
The Problem of Direct Taxation in Austria
Original title·Das Problem der direkten Besteuerung in Österreich
Political Economy as a Subject of Instruction at the Austrian Commercial Schools. A Contribution to the Pedagogy and Methodology of Political Economy
Original title·Die Nationalökonomie als Unterrichtsgegenstand an den österreichischen Handelslehranstalten. Ein Beitrag zur Pädagogik und Methodik der Nationalökonomie
"Bessere Leut'" (Better People) is a Viennese dialect comedy in three acts by Julius v. Gans-Ludassy and Alexander Engel, published in 1904. At its centre stands the impoverished Dobler family, who keep up an outward appearance of bourgeois prosperity while the dismissed bookkeeper Anton Dobler, his ambitious wife Betti and their work-shy son Toni live on credit, borrowing and fraud. Against this milieu the play sets the daughter Martha, who refuses to marry out of calculation, seeks honest work as a piano teacher and in the end wins the minor official Etthofer out of affection. A second plot follows the foreman Zernitz, whose expected inheritance proves to be a castle in the air, as well as Toni's intrigue concerning the niece Paula. Through its dialogue, the comedy addresses class snobbery, money and respectability; the title 'bessere Leut'' is meant ironically.
Frank A. Fetter's "The Principles of Economics" (1905) is an introductory textbook that builds the whole of economic theory on a subjective theory of value: all values are traced back to psychic income, the immediate satisfaction of wants. From marginal utility, demand and exchange, Fetter develops step by step a unified theory of distribution and subordinates rent, capitalization, interest (time value), wages and entrepreneurial profit to this principle. The work is divided into three parts: the value of material things, the value of human services, and the social aspects of value (property, distribution, money, taxes, foreign trade, monopolies, state regulation). According to the preface, the text grew out of lectures at Cornell University and aims at a consistently subjective analysis rather than the traditional mixture of objective and subjective concepts of value; an appendix with questions and bibliographical notes accompanies the 57 chapters.
OriginalEnglish
1904
Oral Opinion on the Reform of the Building Tax
Original title·Mündliches Gutachten über die Reform der Gebäudesteuer
A collective review by Ludwig von Mises of the recent literature on money and banking, published around 1908 in a scholarly economics journal. Mises summarizes and evaluates 41 German-, English-, and French-language titles, arranged by subject area: first, two works on monetary theory (Hoffmann's doctrinal history of monetary-value theories, Kemmerer's reconstruction based on the quantity theory), then writings on the German money market and the Reichsbank, on the Austrian and Swiss banking question, as well as monographs on specific questions such as the monetary system of Luxembourg and the French colonial banks. He repeatedly examines the soundness of the monetary-value and currency theories, commends the wealth of material and the methodology, and distances himself from the gold-currency doctrine and from inflationist proposals. Knapp's State Theory of Money and the question of cash payments run through the review as points of reference.
OriginalDeutsch
1908
Expert Opinion in the Inquiry into Provincial Finances
Original title·Gutachten in der Enquete über die Landesfinanzen
Ludwig von Mises examines whether Austria-Hungary should formally resume cash payments, that is, the legal obligation of the Austro-Hungarian Bank to redeem its notes in gold. His central thesis: in economic terms the gold standard had long been in place, for the Bank had, since 1896, always voluntarily supplied gold and gold-denominated foreign exchange and had kept exchange rates stable between the gold points. A statutory provision would only give legal recognition to this state of affairs and would change nothing in the Bank's policy. Mises refutes the prevailing view that the low Vienna discount rate rested on the suspension of cash payments, tracing it instead to the absence of short-term foreign debt and to weak domestic investment activity. He engages critically with Georg Friedrich Knapp's The State Theory of Money and finally addresses the banking dispute with Hungary. The study, divided into eight sections, appeared in Schmollers Jahrbuch and was completed at the end of 1908.
OriginalDeutsch
1909
The Foreign Exchange Policy of the Austro-Hungarian Bank
Ludwig von Mises responds to Walther Federn's rejoinder and defends his thesis that the Austro-Hungarian Bank makes foreign exchange available to the market at all times at a rate below the upper gold point, and thus in effect pays cash in foreign exchange. Federn claims that the bank at times refuses to supply foreign exchange to interest-rate arbitrageurs. Mises rejects this as contrary to the facts: the bank's only means of defence against gold outflows is to raise the discount rate. The argument proceeds empirically, drawing on the movements of the foreign-exchange rate for German banking centres since 1896, the annexation crisis of 1908/09 and the crisis of 1907, and is supported by statements from Governor von Bilinski and reports of the Vienna Stock Exchange Chamber. The text is connected with the contemporary debate about Knapp's State Theory of Money and the advantages of an isolated currency.
Schumpeter develops a purely economic theory of economic development: the force that changes the economic system from within originates with the entrepreneur, who carries through new combinations of the means of production (a new good, a new method, a new market, a new source of supply, a new form of organization). The first chapter depicts the static circular flow of an economy at rest in equilibrium, in which all product value derives from labour and land and neither entrepreneurial profit nor interest arises. The following chapters address the fundamental phenomenon of development, credit and capital as the creation of purchasing power, entrepreneurial profit as a surplus over costs, interest on capital as an agio of present over future purchasing power, and finally the business cycle, whose upswing and depression are explained by the swarm-like appearance of entrepreneurs. Throughout, Schumpeter separates statics from dynamics and relates his approach to Walras and Marx.
OriginalDeutsch
Further editions
The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle
OriginalEnglish
1911
The Object and Fundamental Concepts of Theoretical Economics
Original title·Objekt und Grundbegriffe der theoretischen Nationalökonomie
Source Book in Economics (1912) is a reader of selected primary sources assembled for college economics courses as a companion to Fetter's Principles of Economics. It collects forty-three numbered selections grouped into seven parts: markets and prices, wealth and its uses, capital and investment, labor and population, costs, profits and monopoly, private incomes and social welfare, and the state and industry. Each selection opens with a brief editorial note and reproduces an extract from a government report (Tariff Board, Interstate Commerce Commission, Commissioner of Corporations, the Mint, the Comptroller of the Currency), an academic study, or a classic author such as Herbert Spencer and Henry Maine. The aim is to set concrete factual material and official findings beside the theoretical questions treated in the textbook, covering exchange, rent, land values, wages, immigration, monopoly, money, banking, and railroad regulation.
OriginalEnglish
1912
Report of the Central Association of Austrian Merchants on the Position of the Merchant Community Regarding the Preparation of the Commercial Treaties
Original title·Bericht des Zentralverbandes österreichischer Kaufleute über die Stellung der Kaufmannschaft zur Vorbereitung der Handelsverträge
Ludwig von Mises examines an Austrian government bill of 1911 intended to reorganize the duties levied on insurance, life-annuity, and provision contracts. He shows that the law on duties currently in force, deriving from the provisional law of 1850, has become opaque and, in terms of social policy, misguided, because it burdens the economically weaker more heavily in percentage terms. The draft replaces the multitude of previous stamp and individual duties with two percentage-based duties on premiums received and on the sums paid out in claims, which Mises acknowledges as an advance in the technical structure of the duties. At the same time he criticizes the sharp increase in the duty burden, the special treatment of policy loans, and the discretionary latitude of the Ministry of Finance in foreign business, and he compares the rates with the lower Prussian taxation of insurance. He situates the bill within the fiscal situation of the state budget and the party-political balance of power in the House of Deputies.
OriginalDeutsch
1912
Original title·Rezension: Erfordernisse des Geldes von Dr. Otto Heyn
A brief review by Ludwig von Mises of Otto Heyn's work "Erfordernisse des Geldes" (Requirements of Money), Leipzig 1912. Mises acknowledges Heyn's contributions to monetary theory, yet in the present sketch he sees the fundamental flaw in Heyn's method particularly clearly: Heyn systematically sidesteps the core problem of monetary theory, the determinants of the purchasing power of money. The review reports Heyn's thesis that in ordinary trade in goods no one takes the quantity of money into account, and that changes in the quantity of money directly affect only the rate of interest, the discount rate in particular, while the exchange value of money is affected only indirectly. Mises counters that such propositions contradict the prevailing doctrine and the facts of the quantity theory, and that they would have required a thorough justification, which Heyn fails to supply.
OriginalDeutsch
1912
Original title·Rezension: Der österreichische Staatsbankerott von 1811, Dr. Paul Stiassny
A short review by Ludwig von Mises of Paul Stiassny's monograph "Der österreichische Staatsbankerott von 1811" (The Austrian State Bankruptcy of 1811; Vienna and Leipzig 1912). Mises raises several criticisms: that the author devotes only 43 pages to the actual exposition, that a prefatory theorizing treatise on the problem of the "Zettelstaat" (the paper-money state) invites objection, and that the rest of the book consists of the verbatim reproduction of patents and documents. Such a work would perhaps have met with approval two decades ago, yet the now stricter scholarly standard of economic history no longer allows it to stand. Mises points to Beer's "Finanzen Österreichs im XIX. Jahrhundert" (Austria's Finances in the Nineteenth Century), which, despite all its shortcomings, offers better orientation on the catastrophe of 1811, and classifies Stiassny's text as a mere occasional piece marking the centenary of the bankruptcy.
OriginalDeutsch
1912
Original title·Rezension: Geldwert in der Geschichte von Andreas Walther
Ludwig von Mises reviews Andreas Walther's methodological study "Geldwert in der Geschichte" (The Value of Money in History, 1912), an attempt to provide a foundation for price-history work in the historical disciplines. Mises acknowledges the inquiry as astute and well-versed in the literature and emphasizes that Walther builds on the budget method refined by Wieser. The aim of price history, on this account, is to obtain a vivid conception of the social use-value of historical price data, not to convert them into present-day money. Mises is critical of Walther's attempt to establish scales of social stratification and "normal budgets": the concept of the normal is, he holds, inapplicable for the historian, and the concessions made to the prevailing view among historians go too far. Despite these objections, Mises emphatically recommends the work as reading for statisticians and historians.
OriginalDeutsch
1912
Problems of ethno-psychological research
Original title·Probleme der ethno-psychologischen Forschung
"Der Sonnenstaat" (The Sun State) is a drama in five acts by Julius v. Gans-Ludassy, published in 1904 and written in blank verse. At its centre stands the former court jester Jean Marot who, as the disguised leader of an uprising, forces the weak King Leo to sign into being a "Sun State" organized along communist lines, with private property abolished, the law of inheritance repealed, child-rearing nationalized, and marriage dissolved. Over the acts that follow, the play shows how this coercive state founders on a shortage economy, bureaucracy, corruption, and the discontent of the people, while the chancellor Reinhart, acting as his antagonist, undermines it. The action culminates in Marot's downfall, his conviction for high treason, and his death on the scaffold, shortly before Queen Regine, who has risen to become regent, pronounces his pardon. In dramatic form, the work treats the conflict between the utopian promise of equality and individual liberty.
OriginalDeutsch
1913
Austria's water management in past and future
Original title·Österreichs Wasserwirtschaft in Vergangenheit und Zukunft
Frank A. Fetter's "Economic Principles" (1915) is the first volume of a two-volume textbook and develops a unified value theory of distribution under the conditions of the modern price system. Value, rent, wages, and interest are treated, as the author indicates by linking back to the preface of his "Principles of Economics" (1904), as different expressions of the same general principles rather than as separate phenomena, each following its own laws. The structure proceeds from the relationship between choice, valuation, and value through exchange, price, and competition to rent, wages, time preference and capitalization, business profit, and finally to dynamic changes such as population, diminishing returns, and the relationship between the theory of value and social welfare. The account argues across six parts with 39 numbered chapters, illustrated largely from contemporary American conditions, and explicitly sets itself apart from the older analysis conventionalized in the college textbooks.
Carl Menger's obituary of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851 to 1914), published in 1915 in the Almanac of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna and expanded here with notes from Schumpeter's writings. The first part traces his life: studies in Vienna, his Habilitation in 1880, a professorship in Innsbruck, several terms as Austrian Minister of Finance, and finally President of the Academy. The second part pays tribute to his scholarly work, from his first publication "Rechte und Verhältnisse" (Rights and Relationships), through the "Theorie des Güterwertes" (Theory of the Value of Goods), to his principal work "Geschichte und Theorie des Kapitalzinses" (History and Theory of Capital Interest). Menger summarizes the positive theory of interest briefly (psychological and technical reasons for preferring present goods over future ones) and sets the at times fierce international criticism in context, without regarding it as diminishing Böhm-Bawerk's significance.
OriginalDeutsch
1915
1815-1866-1879-1915. The New Germany
Original title·1815-1866-1879-1915. Das Neue Deutschland
Modern Economic Problems (1926) is the second volume of Frank A. Fetter's textbook of economics and deals with applied questions of economic policy in the United States, while the first volume presents the theory of value and distribution. In six parts comprising 35 chapters, Fetter discusses money and prices (the origin of money, the quantity theory, fiduciary and political paper money, the gold standard), banking and insurance (the Federal Reserve Act, crises, life insurance), tariffs and taxation, wages and labour (trade unions, the minimum wage, social insurance, immigration), public policy towards private enterprise (agriculture, transport, monopoly), as well as private property and socialism. Each chapter is organised into numbered paragraphs and ends with a list of references; numerous tables and diagrams illustrate the statistics. Fetter writes from the perspective of 'welfare economics' and sets himself apart from pure 'price economics'.
Frank A. Fetter's "Manual of References and Exercises in Economics" (Volume I, 1916) is a companion workbook to the first volume of his textbook "Economic Principles". It assigns to each of the 39 textbook chapters a two-part apparatus: an annotated selection of literature (source works, journal articles, and the collected volumes Materials, Readings and Source Book), together with a series of exercise questions and arithmetical problems. The topics follow the structure of price and distribution theory: choice and value, market and price formation, competition and monopoly, rent, wages, time preference and capitalization, population, as well as machinery and labour. In the preface, Fetter emphasizes that the exercises are meant less to test memory than to train observation and clear thinking, and that preference was given to arithmetical exercises.
Frank A. Fetter's "Manual of References and Exercises in Economics" (Volume II, 1917) is a companion booklet to his textbook "Modern Economic Problems". It organises the material into 31 chapters, from the nation's material resources through money, banking, crises, insurance, foreign trade, tariffs and taxes to labour, population, railways, monopoly, public ownership and socialism. Each chapter offers an annotated reading list with references to contemporary sources (Jevons, Fisher, Taussig, Phillips, the Source Book), and then a series of study questions and calculation exercises. The exercises range from conceptual questions through balance-sheet and index-number calculations to cases on comparative advantage. The preface names colleagues at Princeton as well as Stanley E. Howard as contributors and refers to earlier problem lists developed since 1904. The booklet serves private study and classroom work, not a connected exposition of the theory.
OriginalEnglish
1917
Austria-Hungary's Economy in the World War
Original title·Österreich-Ungarns Volkswirtschaft im Weltkriege
Ludwig von Mises sets out in this work, published in Vienna in 1918, how the costs of the First World War are borne by the economy and distributed among the citizens. His central thesis: a war can be waged only with present goods; it is not money that is decisive but the available real goods, and the burdens are always borne by the present generation, not the future one. Mises distinguishes three ways of financing the state (confiscation without compensation, taxation, and loans) and explains why financing through loans neither favours the capitalists nor shifts the burden onto later generations. Against the fear of a state bankruptcy he counters that Austria-Hungary raised its war debts domestically and that above all small savers would be affected, unlike in the Russian case he cites. As a serious danger he identifies the depreciation of money through an increase in the note issue, against which even mortgage bonds, mortgages, and real property would offer no reliable protection, and thereby makes the case for subscribing to the war loan.
OriginalDeutsch
1918
Control of Wealth and Economic Life—Discussion, American Economic Review
In this newspaper article, Ludwig Mises explains that an increase in the money supply causes the prices of all goods and services to rise, and that no measure of economic policy can halt this rise. The rise in domestic prices and the rise in the exchange rates of foreign currencies are, he argues, two sides of the same phenomenon: the exchange rate is determined by the purchasing power of domestic money, not by the balance of payments, because imports and exports depend primarily on prices. From this he concludes that neither anti-profiteering decrees nor a state foreign-exchange agency can slow the depreciation of the krone; some measures, such as the compulsory surrender of foreign exchange, even act like an export duty. The only remedy, he holds, is to put the state budget on a sound footing, so that the state can do without the printing press; otherwise the value of money faces complete collapse, as it did with the French assignats.
OriginalDeutsch
1919
Original title·Rezension: Die Entwicklung der deutschen und französischen Großbanken, Dr. Walter Huth
In 1918, Ludwig von Mises reviews Walter Huth's study on the development of the German and French great banks in connection with the respective national economy. Prompted by Adolf Weber's distinction between deposit banks and speculation banks, Huth places the German and French banking systems side by side for comparison and gives preference to mixed banking over banking based on the division of labour. Mises judges the work to be diligent and rich in material, but criticizes two shortcomings: its restriction to printed material and its apologetic character, which in his view turns the study into a defence of the German system. Above all, he misses the insight that the difference between the two types of bank is to be explained less by banking technique than by the structure of industry and commerce. He calls the concluding chapter on the consequences of the World War premature.
In this brief obituary, Ludwig Mises pays tribute to the Austrian industrialist and economist Richard Lieben. At its centre stands Lieben's principal scholarly work, the "Untersuchungen über die Theorie des Preises" (Investigations into the Theory of Price), written together with his brother-in-law Rudolf Auspitz and published thirty years earlier, which employs an analytical method and graphical representation and for that reason gained recognition only slowly. Mises does not count Auspitz and Lieben among the Austrian School, but places them, on account of their mathematical method, alongside Walras and Jevons. He also highlights Lieben's smaller writings on currency questions, his advocacy of a sound-money policy against inflationist doctrines, and his contributions to the Valutaenquete (currency enquiry) of 1892. The text closes by noting an eye ailment that denied Lieben his own work in his final years.
OriginalDeutsch
1919
Original title·Einstellung der Notenvermehrung oder Devisenverordnungen
Ludwig Mises responds to an article by the financial councillor Dr Franz Bartsch and defends the thesis that the depreciation of the krone is caused by inflation, that is, the increase in banknotes, and not by an unfavourable balance of payments. According to Mises, Bartsch holds the balance-of-payments theory; Mises rejects any intermediate position between the two doctrines. Drawing on several examples from Bartsch's text (import risk, the compulsion to export imposed by the central foreign-exchange office, the import of cheese and watches), he argues that the foreign-exchange regulations fail to achieve their purpose and are shaped by the spirit of mercantilism. He also rejects the use of the printing press to provide for the population: inflation does not increase the stock of goods but acts like a tax that redistributes the income and wealth of domestic residents. Whoever wishes to restore the currency must combat the balance-of-payments doctrine and bring inflation to an end.
OriginalDeutsch
1919
Original title·Stadt und Land in der direkten Besteuerung
In this article, published in 1919 in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, Ludwig Mises analyses the imbalance in direct taxation between town and country in post-war Austria. His central thesis: because the fixed rates of yield tax have been eroded by the depreciation of money, rural landed property in fact contributes less and less, while the urban commercial population is squeezed dry through the taxation of apparent, inflation-induced war profits. Mises shows how, as the value of money falls, bookkeeping reports mere changes in monetary expression as profit, and he criticizes the raising of taxes in kind as a regression in fiscal technique. He calls for ground rent, as the only natural wealth of the land, to be drawn upon for taxation, and, in accordance with the principle of certainty, for forest taxation to be incamerated (taken into the state treasury). The text combines a tax-policy diagnosis with argument drawn from monetary theory.
OriginalDeutsch
1919
Original title·Zur Wiedereinführung des börsenmässigen Valutahandels
In this short article on economic policy, Ludwig Mises argues for the reintroduction of proper forward and spot dealing in foreign currencies and foreign exchange on an organised exchange, as well as for the abolition of the Foreign Exchange Office (Devisenzentrale) in Vienna. The starting point is the progressive depreciation of the krone: importers who obtain goods on credit from abroad and sell them at home for kronen bear an almost unbearable currency risk, and without a functioning forward market they have no means of hedging. Mises contends that the existing foreign-exchange restrictions achieve the opposite of their purpose and are retained only as part of the system of the wartime and transitional economy. He emphasizes the increased importance of Vienna as a trading centre between East and West, and closes by noting that all measures remain ineffective as long as inflation is sustained by the continual issue of new banknotes.
OriginalDeutsch
1919
Original title·Der Wiedereintritt Deutsch-Österreichs in das Reich und die Währungsfrage
In 1919 Ludwig Mises examines how the monetary system of German-Austria is to be joined to that of the German Reich, should the political union come about. His central thesis: political union necessarily entails monetary union; an independent krone cannot be maintained alongside a common policy. Mises first traces the history of the Austrian currency (the Vienna Coinage Union of 1857, the currency reform of 1892, wartime inflation) and then develops two paths towards unification: the mere adoption of the mark currency by a separate German-Austrian bank of issue, or full incorporation into the German Reichsbank; the model of two cartel banks he rejects. Considerable space is devoted to the fiscal precondition (the Reich assumes part of the Austrian war debt) and to the setting of the conversion ratio between krone and mark, which, in his view, must be governed by purchasing power and not by the pre-war parity. Mises concludes that the monetary union is viable only if both states forgo any further inflation.
Ludwig Mises responds to a Copenhagen report according to which the Soviet government had abolished money and replaced it with time-limited payment orders issued by the state goods-distribution offices. He reads the step as a further attempt, forced by the pressure of circumstances, to counter the galloping depreciation of the rouble, and draws parallels with the assignats of the French Revolution and with the Continental currency of the United States. At its core, he argues that in a purely socialist commonwealth, where the means of production as res extra commercium bear no money price, no economic calculation is possible: without economic calculation there can be no economic activity, and neither statistics nor calculation in kind nor calculation in labour hours can close this gap. The text refers to Stourm as a historian of revolutionary fiscal policy as well as to Lenin's demand for bourgeois accounting, and describes the question of calculation as the principal and fundamental problem of socialism.
OriginalDeutsch
1920
Original title·Zu Karl Mengers achtzigstem Geburtstag
On the occasion of Carl Menger's eightieth birthday, Ludwig von Mises pays tribute to his work and to his influence on economics. He traces how the science had reached an impasse around the middle of the nineteenth century, and how, around 1871, Menger in Austria, Jevons in England and Léon Walras in Switzerland, independently of one another, based the theory of value on the subjective use-value of goods. Menger's "Principles of Economics" is described as the book that revolutionized the discipline and on which all later work builds. The text refers to the "Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences" of 1883, to Menger's contributions to the currency problem, and to Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk as the other principal representatives of the Austrian School. In conclusion, Mises accords Menger's life's work an enduring place in the history of the social sciences.
Mises comments on the dramatic decline of the Central European currencies at the end of January 1920 and attributes the plunging exchange rates of the crown, the Reichsmark and the Czech crown solely to the continued inflationary policy of the states involved in the war. With reference to the North American Continental currency of 1781 and the French assignats of 1796, he warns that, if policy remained unchanged, the collapse of the currencies down to zero would become inevitable, with incomparably more severe consequences than on those earlier occasions, because Central Europe is industrialized. He explains the sharp decline of the Reichsmark by the inflationary doctrines of Knapp and Bendixen, as well as by Bendixen's proposal to redeem the German war bonds with a hundred billion new banknotes, while the Erzberger tax laws simultaneously paralysed German industry. He links the currency question to the danger of a Bolshevik overthrow and calls for a revision of the treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain. For German-Austria he concludes that only the immediate cessation of inflation could still avert state bankruptcy.
OriginalDeutsch
1920
Original title·Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen
Ludwig von Mises argues that a socialist economic order which abolishes private ownership of the means of production can no longer carry out rational economic calculation. Without a market for producer goods, no money prices form for these goods, and without such prices the costs and returns of competing methods of production cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Mises distinguishes monetary calculation from subjective use-value, calculation in kind, and the labour theory of value, and shows why none of these alternatives can replace the calculational function of money. In Section IV he links the problem of calculation to the absence of entrepreneurial responsibility and initiative in the nationalized enterprise. In the fifth section he examines the contemporary Marxist programmes of Otto Bauer and Lenin and reproaches them for failing to see the core problem of economic calculation at all. The text closes with the conclusion that rational economic activity in the socialist commonwealth is impossible, which, taken on its own, decides neither for nor against socialism.
In this essay, published in 1921 in the “Neue Freie Presse”, Ludwig Mises examines the legal claims of the holders of banknotes of the Austro-Hungarian Bank in the course of its liquidation under the Treaty of Saint-Germain. His central thesis: the war notes were in substance state notes, issued by the Bank in form only, which is why the note-holders have no claim beyond the conversion into the new legal tender at the respective exchange value. Any compensation beyond this would be an unexpected gift to precisely those who profited from the depreciation of the currency, and would not reach those harmed by the collapse in its value. Mises is particularly critical of point 9 of Article 206, which grants the presenting successor states an equal right to the Bank's entire assets, calling it an additional bonus that has no basis in monetary theory and that also violates the rights of the other creditors and the shareholders.
OriginalDeutsch
1921
Labor in the Socialist Commonwealth
Original title·Die Arbeit im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen
In this short essay on economic policy, Ludwig Mises argues against the draft of a Viennese luxury-goods levy drawn up by the Vienna municipal authority. His central thesis: such a levy would fall above all on Vienna's luxury and final-goods industries, whose sales are made to a large extent through the retail trade to foreigners staying temporarily in Vienna. Unlike an ordinary consumption tax, the burden could not be shifted onto these foreign buyers, since they could simply redirect their orders to competitors abroad. Mises points to the German Turnover Tax Act of 24 December 1919, which exempts exports, and to the Czechoslovak luxury levy, which he interprets as a measure of economic warfare against Vienna as a trading city. Since a tax exemption for foreign buyers would in practice be unfeasible, the whole idea of the levy proves impracticable for Vienna and would endanger the business people, employees and workers of the luxury sector.
OriginalDeutsch
1921
Original title·Wie könnte Österreich gerettet werden?
In this short essay from the period of the Austrian inflation, Ludwig von Mises sets out a programme of economic policy for stabilizing the krone and the Viennese economy. His central thesis: the objective preconditions for Austria to flourish are in place, yet misguided policy is drawing down the reserves of earlier decades of a free economy. He traces the progressive depreciation of the krone to the inflation of banknotes, which in his view can be halted only by eliminating the state deficit, above all through the privatization of public enterprises and the winding-down of the food programme. In fifteen consecutively numbered points he calls for the stabilization of the value of money rather than a reduction in prices, the freeing of trade in foreign currency, the abolition of all import bans and impediments to transport, as well as free trade and tax concessions for new industrial facilities. Mises addresses the programme to a politician who had asked him for it, and concludes sceptically that hardly any party is prepared to carry it out, though he hopes that the reasonable course will prevail.
OriginalDeutsch
1921
Prolegomena to a Theory of Economic Data
Original title·Prolegomena zu einer Theorie der ökonomischen Daten
Mises argues against the widespread demand to ease the situation perceived as a scarcity of money by issuing further banknotes. In his view, a scarcity of money, understood as a rise in the short-term interest rate, cannot be remedied by increasing the quantity of money: a larger quantity of money only raises prices and wages, but does not lower the interest rate. On the contrary, the expected depreciation of money drives interest rates upward, because creditors demand a purchasing-power premium. Mises interprets the shortage of banknotes in everyday transactions as a symptom of far-advanced inflation, in which panic buying anticipates a future depreciation. The only remedy he names is to stop the printing press; any further expansion of the note circulation would worsen the imbalance and threaten to bring about the collapse of the monetary system.
OriginalDeutsch
1922
Original title·Rezension: Eastern Exchange, Currency and Finance von William F. Spalding
Ludwig von Mises reviews the third edition of William F. Spalding's 'Eastern Exchange, Currency and Finance' (London 1920) and recommends the work to the German readership. The occasion, according to Mises, is a widespread misunderstanding of the Gold Exchange Standard in the German monetary literature: he takes issue with Georg Friedrich Knapp and his pupils, who misinterpreted the Austro-Hungarian gold-core-currency policy and overlooked that it corresponds to the Gold Exchange Standard policy followed in British India, which follows on from Ricardo's 'Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency' (1816). Spalding's account of the monetary conditions of India, China, Japan and other Asian regions is, in Mises's view, especially valuable for the war and post-war period, which is difficult to access. Beyond monetary affairs, the book, as Mises notes, also covers the organization of trade and the customs system, and thus serves as a handbook for economists and the practical merchant alike.
OriginalDeutsch
1922
Original title·Das österreichische Währungsproblem vor dreissig Jahren und Heute
In this commemorative essay, Ludwig Mises looks back on the Austrian Currency Inquiry Commission, which convened in Vienna in March 1892 under Finance Minister Steinbach and Sektionschef Böhm-Bawerk. He describes the problem of that time: it was not a progressive decline in the value of money but a rise in its value that drove the currency regulation, which gave Austria-Hungary a gold-core currency (Gold Exchange Standard) modelled on Ricardo's ideas. Mises sets the situation of 1892 against the present, in which the budget deficit must first be covered without recourse to the printing press before the currency problem can be solved. He recounts the debate between the light and the heavy gulden and Benedikt's plea for the current market rate (Momentkurs). As the central lesson, he records that it is not an unfavourable balance of payments but inflation alone that endangers the stability of the value of money.
OriginalDeutsch
1922
Original title·Rezension: The Evolution of Industrial Freedom in Prussia, 1840-1849 von Hugo C. M. Wendel
A brief book review by Ludwig Mises of Hugo C. M. Wendel's study "The Evolution of Industrial Freedom in Prussia, 1840-1849". Mises characterizes the work as a concise overview, based on printed material, of that period in the history of trade in Prussia which ended with the victory of guild ideas in the emergency decree of 9 February 1849. He differentiates the value of the study by reader group: to the German reader it offers little that is new, whereas to the American reader it provides an insight into the world, unfamiliar to him, of policy directed at the commercial middle class. He notes as a weakness that the intellectual-historical foundations of the medieval economic constitution are left out of account. The review closes with the place (Vienna) and an indication of authorship, and thereby treats freedom of trade, the guild system, and middle-class policy in the Prussia of the Vormärz (pre-March period).
In this essay, completed in 1923, Ludwig Mises examines the monetary-theory aspect of currency stabilization, taking as his starting point the hyperinflation in the German Reich and in Austria after the First World War. His central thesis: progressive currency depreciation is never an inevitable result of the economic situation, but always the consequence of inflationist policy, namely the covering of state expenditure through the issue of banknotes. Mises describes the possible collapse of a paper currency, demands as the first condition of reform the shutting down of the printing press and a return to gold, and argues against the balance-of-payments theory as well as against the notion that exchange controls could halt the decline. He addresses the argument of conditional inflationism, the reparations payments of the Treaty of Versailles, and sketches the outlines of a new monetary constitution tied to gold. In support, he draws on historical cases, the American continental currency (1781) and the French mandats territoriaux (1796). In conclusion, he interprets inflationism as an ideological problem, connected with statism and socialism.
OriginalDeutsch
1923
The Economic Categories and the Organization of the Economy
Original title·Die ökonomischen Kategorien und die Organisation der Wirtschaft
Ludwig Mises reviews Waldemar Mitscherlich's 'Der Nationalismus Westeuropas' (The Nationalism of Western Europe) (Leipzig 1920). At the centre lies the distinction between nationality, the fact of national difference among people, and nationalism, the efficacy of certain ideologies that ascribe to this difference a significance for social behaviour. Mises argues that the neglect of this distinction has led to the criterion of the nation being sought somewhere other than in the linguistic community, and he refers to Arndt, Jakob Grimm and Wilhelm Scherer. He commends Mitscherlich's work as primarily a historically oriented attempt to explain the emergence of Western European nationalism genetically, but criticises the neglect of the economic problem, in particular of the connection between nationalism and protectionism, and the ideal of an autarkic union economy that follows from it.
OriginalDeutsch
1923
New Contributions to the Problem of Socialist Economic Calculation
Original title·Neue Beiträge zum Problem der sozialistischen Wirtschaftsrechnung
In this short newspaper article, Ludwig Mises discusses the book "Der Selbstmord eines Volkes, Wirtschaft in Österreich" (The Suicide of a People: Economy in Austria) by Siegfried Strakosch and takes it as the occasion for his own diagnosis of Austria's economic situation. His central thesis: the fundamental ill is the de facto dominance of socialist ideas and of Social Democracy, which prevents any consolidation of the state budget so long as state enterprises are not sold off and the eight-hour day is left untouched. Mises argues that socialist fiscal policy amounts to the consumption and destruction of productive capital, and he draws a historical parallel with the fiscal policy of the Jacobins, which, by way of an extended quotation from Stourm, he portrays as pure exploitation of the present at the expense of the future. The text closes with Strakosch's admonition to reverse course completely.
OriginalDeutsch
1923
Original title·Wilhelm Rosenbergs politische Wirksamkeit
In this short essay, Ludwig Mises pays tribute to the political work of Wilhelm Rosenberg, an economist and jurist whose significance Mises locates in his advocacy of an Austrian programme of self-help after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy. Mises describes the situation of a state deemed unviable after Saint-Germain, one that placed its hopes solely on the forbidden union with Germany and on foreign loans, while domestic reforms were left undone. Faced with the looming currency collapse in the autumn of 1921, Rosenberg, a student of Carl Menger and an opponent of inflationism, stepped forward as a private citizen alongside Finance Minister Gürtler. His programme called for cutting food subsidies, ending money printing, and eliminating the budget deficit before any loans could serve a purpose. Mises sets this success against the hostile reception among the contemporary 'opponents of stabilization' and closes with a personal obituary for Rosenberg as a leader of economic reconstruction.
In this obituary on the tenth anniversary of his death, Ludwig Mises honours Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk as scholar, teacher and statesman. He traces Böhm-Bawerk's scholarly career: from the early paper on capital interest in 1876, through the preparatory work of the 1880s, to “The Positive Theory of Capital” of 1889, the principal work on the theory of interest. Mises stresses the international recognition of Böhm-Bawerk's teaching and the long lack of understanding of the “Austrian School” within the German Reich. The occasion for the text is a collection of Böhm-Bawerk's shorter writings (1924), edited by Franz X. Weiß. Mises quotes at length Böhm's late statements on the passive balance of trade and on thrift in public budgets, which he reads as a clear-sighted diagnosis of Austrian state finances.
OriginalDeutsch
1924
Original title·Finanz- und währungspolitische Fragen in der Gegenwart
The lecture defends the gold standard against proposals to replace it with a state-directed monetary system or one based on index numbers. Mises regards the inflationary and deflationary policies of the post-war years as refuted both in practice and in theory, and sees the decisive advantage of gold in the fact that the movement of its value remains independent of government intervention. The core of the argument is the critique of the index-number system: the selection and weighting of goods, the choice of the average, and the constant shifting of consumption make an exact measurement of the value of money impossible. He then discusses the gold bullion standard with foreign-exchange backing as well as the plans of Keynes and Irving Fisher, and rejects both. The conclusion: the choice lies only between the gold standard and a manipulated currency, and gold, though not an ideal solution, is under the given circumstances the best one possible, the reintroduction of which would require international agreements.
OriginalDeutsch
1924
Original title·Rezension: Das Geld von Karl Helfferich
Ludwig Mises reviews the sixth edition of Karl Helfferich's standard work "Das Geld" (Money), first published in 1903. Mises honours Helfferich as the successor in monetary theory and currency policy to Ludwig Bamberger, who defended the German gold standard against bimetallists and inflationists. He locates the decisive break already between the first and second editions: Helfferich had fallen under the spell of Georg Friedrich Knapp's state theory of money and had sought, in an eclecticism that Mises found untenable, to reconcile Bamberger and Knapp. As a second shortcoming, he names the complete disregard of both the foreign and the German literature on monetary theory. Mises sees the book's enduring value in its discussions of monetary history and statistics, whereas in theoretical terms it does not satisfy.
In this 1924 lecture, Ludwig Mises takes up the question of whether the gold standard should be retained as the foundation of the international monetary system or replaced by a state-directed paper-money system. After a reckoning with the inflationary and deflationary policies of the post-war years, he defends gold as a safeguard against government intervention in the determination of the value of money. At its centre lies a critique of the index-number standard: drawing on the practical and fundamental difficulties of computing a price index (the selection of goods, their weighting, the choice of the average), Mises shows that no index can measure the value of money unambiguously. He engages with the reform proposals of Keynes and Irving Fisher, and with the gold-exchange standard, in which reserves are held in gold-backed foreign exchange rather than in actual gold. His conclusion: the gold standard is not ideal, but under the prevailing circumstances it is the best possible one, because the alternative means perpetual struggles among interest groups over the value of money.
OriginalDeutsch
1924
Original title·Rezension: Deutschlands kranke Wirtschaft und ihre Wiederherstellung von Dr. Gustav Seibt
Ludwig Mises reviews Gustav Seibt's occasional paper 'Deutschlands kranke Wirtschaft und ihre Wiederherstellung' ('Germany's Ailing Economy and Its Recovery') (Bonn 1923), which the Bonn professor of statistics had presented on 1 December 1922. Mises commends the paper for resolutely countering the common fallacies of contemporary economic policy: Seibt builds on arguments from monetary theory, develops the quantity theory and rejects the balance-of-payments theory of exchange rates, in order to ground on this his critique of the prevailing views on the sell-off, capital consumption, underproduction, tenant protection, tax policy and reparations. The reform programme culminates in the demands 'shutting down the printing press' and 'back to the free economy'. Mises notes that Seibt's warning of the collapse of the German monetary system has proved true, yet that he was heeded no more than other admonishers, and recommends the paper as a clear, generally intelligible introduction to the theoretical problems of German economic policy.
In this 1929 volume Ludwig von Mises brings together five studies on the economic policy and economic ideology of the present day, supplemented by the essay "Verstaatlichung des Kredits?" ("Nationalization of Credit?"). The central thesis: between an order founded on private ownership of the means of production and one founded on common ownership there is no permanently viable third form. Interventionism, which seeks only to regulate private ownership through governmental intervention rather than abolish it, is held to be internally contradictory: isolated interventions such as price controls or minimum wages fail to achieve their purpose and force the state step by step into full socialization. Mises argues from the standpoint of economics and critically engages with Kathedersozialismus (socialism of the chair), the Historical School (Schmoller, Brentano, Herkner), with J. M. Clark, and with Sombart's relationship to Marxism. The appended essay examines Deumer's proposal for a state credit monopoly and its bureaucratic consequences.
Ludwig Mises contributes a foreword to Fritz Machlup's monograph on the gold exchange standard (Goldkernwährung) and in doing so outlines the subject of the book. He traces how a gold currency without effective gold circulation took shape from the German coinage reform of 1871 to 1873, by way of the Indian currency reform of the 1890s, its intellectual origin lying in Ricardo's work of 1816. Mises describes the advantages of this arrangement (a reduced need for gold, interest-bearing foreign exchange reserves) and its critical point: not all countries can hold their reserves in gold-convertible foreign exchange at the same time. He places the question within the post-war debate, distances himself from the proposals of Irving Fisher and Keynes, and commends Machlup's presentation, both doctrinal-historical and systematic, together with the first German translation of Ricardo's currency plan in the appendix.
Ludwig Mises defends the gold standard in this essay from the series "Der Volkswirt" against contemporary proposals for a state-managed monetary order. His central argument: the advantage of gold lies not in a supposed value "in itself", but in the fact that increases and decreases in the quantity of gold are beyond political influence and are governed by the law of the profitability of mining. Against the plans for a currency based on index numbers, advocated by Keynes, Josiah Stamp and Irving Fisher, he raises two objections: changes in purchasing power cannot be measured unambiguously, and the effect of a change in the money supply on prices is neither proportional nor predictable. An index-linked currency would make the determination of the value of money an object of political struggle. Mises attributes the rise in prices over the preceding decades less to gold production than to the deliberate expansion of unbacked fiduciary media.
The stenographic transcript brings together Ludwig von Mises's contributions to the discussion at the Stuttgart conference of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (1924) on the theoretical and economic-technical aspects of the currency problem. Against the sceptical view that theory remains without consequence, Mises counters that it was precisely the state theory of money and the rejection of the quantity theory that had made possible the inflationary policy of the war and post-war years. He interprets the stabilization as a transition to a gold-core or dollar-core currency, dismisses the fear of an inflation imported through the inflow of loans, and warns against undermining the effective redemption of banknotes through banking-technical contrivances or foreign-exchange regulations. In terms of the history of doctrine, he notes that opposition to the quantity theory is not of German origin but was imported into Germany together with the banking theory. In his replies he engages with Bortkiewicz, Spitzmüller and Bernhard, and describes his own influence on Austrian currency policy as confined to literary work and lectures.
Critical Remarks on Schumpeter’s Gold Theory. On the Doctrine of the Objective Exchange Value of Gold, in Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft u. Sozialpolitik
Original title·Kritische Bemerkungen zu Schumpeters Goldtheorie. Zur Lehre vom objektiven Tauschwert des Goldes, in Zeitschrift für Volkswirtschaft u. Sozialpolitik
The Development of Advertising from Antiquity to the Present. Successful Means of Business, Personal and Idea Advertising from All Eras and Countries [with Erwin Paneth]
Original title·Entwicklung der Reklame vom Altertum bis zur Gegenwart. Erfolgreiche Mittel der Geschäfts-Personen und Ideenreklame aus allen Zeiten und Ländern [mit Erwin Paneth]
Ludwig Mises reviews the multi-volume collection 'Papers relating to Political Economy', in which F. Y. Edgeworth for the first time brings together his essays and critiques, which had appeared in scattered form in the Economic Journal over decades. Mises places Edgeworth among the leading English economists of the turn of the century and outlines the structure of the three volumes: value and distribution, monopoly and monetary theory, international trade, taxation, mathematical economics, and book reviews. At the centre is Edgeworth's reserved assessment of the mathematical method, which Mises expressly shares and supports with two quotations in the English original. He notes that a considerable part of the works brought something new at the time of publication, but is now outdated, and he values Edgeworth above all as a critical mind, more inclined to track down problems than to solve them.
The preface by Ludwig von Mises (Vienna, 5 January 1926) introduces Siegfried Strakosch's critique of the new agrarian programme of Austrian Social Democracy. Mises interprets this programme as an attempt to convert a large part of agriculture and forestry into an enterprise dependent on subsidies: the expropriation and nationalization of large landed estates and forests, even though, according to his account, the federal enterprises operate consistently at a deficit. He argues that the programme promises the rural electorate outlays from public funds without naming their financing, and that it aims solely at gaining votes. Strakosch, presented by Mises as a successful farmer as well as a natural scientist and a writer on economics, examines the programme in detail. Mises hopes that Strakosch's factual exposition will open readers' eyes to the danger of its implementation.
OriginalDeutsch
1926
Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser and His Work
Original title·Friedrich Freiherr von Wieser und sein Werk
Review of: Rüdiger von der Goltz, The Theory of Exchange Rates in Germany during the Years 1914 to 1922 Compared with Goschen's Theory of 1854
Original title·Rezension zu: Rüdiger von der Goltz, Die Theorie der Wechselkurse in Deutschland während der Jahre 1914 bis 1922 verglichen mit Goschens Theorie von 1854
A rendering of a lecture given by Ludwig von Mises on 17 December 1926 before the Central Federation of Austrian Industry (Hauptverband der Industrie Österreichs). Mises argues that Europe ought not to expect the solution to its post-war problems from the United States, neither in political nor in economic-policy terms. He traces the transformation of the USA from a capital importer into the world's largest creditor after the World War, and documents it with figures from the American balance of payments and balance of trade for the years 1925 and 1926. He locates the inner contradiction in the high protective tariff: as a creditor country, the USA could recover the interest owed by its debtors only through imports of goods, while its tariff policy kept out precisely those imports. Mises concludes that the USA could supply capital, but not the political and ideological foundations of reconstruction, which would have to come from Europe itself.
Ludwig von Mises reviews the first, English-German part of Hereward T. Price's "Volkswirtschaftliches Wörterbuch" (Dictionary of Economics; 1926). He welcomes the undertaking as a response to a long-felt need, but sharply criticizes its execution. He faults both gaps (such as Behaviourism, Institutionalism, Birmingham Currency School) and superfluous everyday terms, and above all imprecise or incorrect explanations of technical terms. Using examples such as hoard, acquisitive society, Banking Principle, residual claimant and invisible imports, Mises shows how the entries ought to have been framed more precisely, and points to the relevant literature and to his own translation in "Socialism" ("Die Gemeinwirtschaft"). Despite these objections, he considers the book a usable aid even in its present form, and expects improvements in future editions.
OriginalDeutsch
1927
Original title·Rezension: Das Ende des Laissez-Faire von J. M. Keynes
Ludwig von Mises reviews John Maynard Keynes's essay "The End of Laissez-Faire", delivered as a Berlin lecture in 1926. Keynes criticizes liberalism and capitalism and repudiates free private ownership of the means of production, yet at the same time he rejects socialism and recommends, as a middle way, private property regulated by social control and exercised by semi-autonomous bodies within the framework of the state. Mises holds this proposal to be nothing new, but rather the long-standing programme of official scholarship. His principal objection is directed against the title: Keynes, he argues, speaks only of "laissez faire" but passes over "laissez passer" in silence, that is, the freedom of movement of people and goods. Precisely because the world has for decades no longer been governed according to this maxim, Mises sees war, mass misery and dictatorship as consequences of the prevailing anti-liberalism, not of liberalism.
OriginalDeutsch
1927
Original title·Rezension: Neue Briefe über Grundrente, Rentenprinzip und soziale Frage an Schumacher von Carl Rodbertus-Jagetzow
Ludwig von Mises reviews "Neue Briefe über Grundrente, Rentenprinzip und soziale Frage an Schumacher" (New Letters to Schumacher on Ground Rent, the Rent Principle, and the Social Question) by Carl Rodbertus-Jagetzow, edited by Robert Michels and Ernst Ackermann (Karlsruhe 1926, Verlag G. Braun), the first volume of the "Bibliothek der Soziologie und Politik" (Library of Sociology and Politics). According to Mises, the letters, collected by Theophil Kozak, deal with agricultural credit, the rent principle, and the social question, as well as further political and economic topics; only Rodbertus's letters survive, not those of Schumacher. Mises highlights the appendix of around 150 pages, which contains partly unpublished documentary material, and especially Michels's introduction "Rodbertus und sein Kreis" (Rodbertus and His Circle), which in his view supersedes Dietzel's older work on Rodbertus. He regards the edition as an interesting contribution both to Rodbertus's teachings and to German history after the founding of the German Empire.
Review of: Gottfried Haberler, The Meaning of Index Numbers. An Investigation into the Concept of the Price Level and the Methods of Its Measurement
Original title·Rezension zu: Gottfried Haberler, Der Sinn der Indexzahlen. Eine Untersuchung über den Begriff des Preisniveaus und die Methoden seiner Messung
Ludwig von Mises reviews Eduard Heimann's work "Die sittliche Idee des Klassenkampfes und die Entartung des Kapitalismus" (The Moral Idea of the Class Struggle and the Degeneration of Capitalism; publisher J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., "Schriften zur Zeit" series, 1926). Mises distinguishes two parts of the book: in the first, Heimann justifies the class struggle as a moral value from a perspective coloured by Marxism and religion, which Mises criticizes as a line of argument that is utilitarian and difficult to reconcile with the Gospel. The second part, which rejects capitalism on account of inflation, tariffs and cartels, Mises takes seriously as economically relevant. He disputes Heimann's attribution of blame to the entrepreneurs and instead interprets the ills complained of as necessary consequences of an interventionist policy supported by all social strata. The review thus situates Heimann's diagnosis within the tradition of academic socialism (Kathedersozialismus) and protectionism, which Mises rejects.
In this short programmatic text, Ludwig von Mises situates monetary theory within the development of theoretical economics. He divides its history into a classical, objectivist period (Hume, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Say) and the subjectivist current active since about 1870 (Gossen, Menger, Walras, Jevons). His central thesis: the subjectivist school had for a long time not applied its theory of value to money, but had made up for this in the two decades before this text was composed, by going beyond the mere quantity theory and explaining the formation of the original value of money through the principle of marginal utility. To this he adds banking theory in the tradition of Wicksell, and business cycle theory. Mises emphasizes the continuity with the classical doctrine, refers to his "Theory of Money and Credit", and points to the significance of the insight that economic calculation is possible only as monetary calculation.
OriginalDeutsch
1928
Original title·Währung und Finanzen des Bundesstaates Österreich
In 1928 Ludwig von Mises describes the state of the currency and public finances of the Republic of Austria. His starting point is the financial reconstruction initiated in 1922 by Federal Chancellor Seipel: the renunciation of the printing press, the balancing of the state budget and the fixing of the gold value of the krone, set against the inflationary policy of the post-war years under Renner. Mises portrays the successful stabilization, the introduction of the schilling and the groschen in 1924, and the note-issuing policy of the Austrian National Bank, which was bound to the Banking Act. Drawing on the federal budget estimate for 1928, he analyses tax revenues, monopolies and the loss-making public enterprises, above all the Federal Railways, the Post and the Forests. He sees the greatest need for reform in the costly administrations of the provinces and municipalities and in the municipal-socialist policy of Vienna. His conclusion: the stabilization has succeeded; the future task is one of production policy, above all the reduction of direct taxes.
OriginalDeutsch
1928
On the History and Assessment of Exact Forms of Thought in the Social Sciences
Original title·Zur Geschichte und Beurteilung der exakten Denkformen in den Sozialwissenschaften
The volume gathers six essays on economic policy by Ludwig von Mises, published in 1929 under the title "Kritik des Interventionismus" (A Critique of Interventionism). Mises argues that there is no lasting third way between private and common ownership of the means of production: isolated state intervention in prices, wages, and production always fails to achieve the goal pursued by its originators and consequently drives either toward the abolition of the interventions or toward socialism. The texts engage critically with the German Historical School, the Kathedersozialismus or "socialism of the chair" (Schmoller, Brentano), the wage theory of the trade unions, Sombart, and Schmalenbach's thesis of the "bound economy" (gebundene Wirtschaft). The concluding pieces deal with the theory of price ceilings (Preistaxen) and the nationalization of the credit system.
Ludwig von Mises reviews the first volume of Ernst Grünfeld's "Handbuch des Genossenschaftswesens" (Handbook of the Cooperative System, 1928), which is devoted to economic and sociological questions. Mises notes that the once ambitious economic-policy expectations placed on consumer, producer, and agricultural cooperatives, namely that they would overcome capitalism, have not been fulfilled, whereas the cooperative as a form of enterprise has acquired a lasting field of activity. At the centre of his review stands the sociological section (pages 42 to 49): Mises objects that Grünfeld omits the role of cooperatives in the service of political, religious, cultural, and national ideas, although it is precisely this extra-economic function that makes the cooperative system a unified phenomenon. Overall, he commends the work as an excellent achievement.
OriginalDeutsch
1929
Original title·Karl Menger und die Österreichische Schule der Nationalökonomie
In this newspaper article of 1929, written for the unveiling of the Menger monument at the University of Vienna, Ludwig Mises gives a brief overview of the work of the Austrian School of Economics founded by Carl Menger. Mises traces the path from the classical economists (Hume, Smith, Ricardo), through the Methodenstreit against the German Historical School, to Menger's solution of the antinomy of value by means of the theory of marginal utility. He explains the subjective theory of value and the imputation of the prices of higher-order goods to consumer valuation, and names allies and successors: Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Jevons, Walras, Gossen, Clark. The closing section interprets the experiences of crisis and inflation in the war and post-war years as a confirmation of the theory that the Historical School had disdained, and sees Menger's work as having become the foundation of modern economics.
Mises presents interventionism as a third economic system between capitalism and socialism and argues that it cannot exist as an independent, lasting system. Its means is the isolated intervention by the authorities, a single command that forces the use of the means of production against market conditions, without directing the whole of production along socialist lines. Using the example of the statutory maximum price, Mises demonstrates how such an intervention misses its own aim: a price below the market price causes the goods to disappear from the market and forces the authorities into ever further interventions, from compulsory selling, through rationing, to the fixing of all prices and wages. From this follows, for him, the alternative of either capitalism or socialism; a middle ground, he maintains, does not exist. The conclusion sets out why liberalism rejects these interventions not out of hostility to the state, but out of recognition of their self-defeating character.
Human society in its ethno-sociological foundations, Volume 2: Emergence, change and formation of family, kinship and associations in the light of ethnological research
Original title·Die menschliche Gesellschaft in ihren ethno-soziologischen Grundlagen, Band 2: Werden, Wandel und Gestaltung von Familie, Verwandtschaft und Bünden im Lichte der Völkerforschung
In 1931, Ludwig von Mises analyses the banking-policy lessons of the banking crisis of that time and identifies the close entanglement of German and Austrian banks with industry as the central weakness. Unlike English and American banks, which, as pure bankers, lent out money belonging to others, the German banks had become industrial conglomerates, so that the critical scrutiny of creditworthiness, which had served as a regulator of the money market, was lost. As the most urgent reform, Mises calls for the dissolution of the link between banks and conglomerates, a sharper differentiation of interest rates by maturity, the long-term investment of savings deposits to reduce the danger of a bank run, and greater transparency in the banks' financial statements. The banks' secretiveness had proved especially harmful; public oversight was indispensable to the safety of a banking institution. The text reads as an economic-policy commentary on the acute crisis of three major banks that had failed in Vienna and Berlin.
In this 1931 newspaper article, Ludwig Mises defends the gold standard against its opponents. His central thesis: the gold standard removes the purchasing power of the monetary unit from the reach of shifting views on monetary policy and secures stable currency and foreign-exchange rates. Mises works through the objections of the gold standard's opponents one by one: the charge of excessive price increases (Irving Fisher), the desire for inflation, the alleged rise in the rate of interest, and the argument of an unfavourable balance of payments. He traces each objection back to the attempt to lower the rate of interest artificially through credit expansion, which, by way of an illusory boom, inevitably ends in crisis and currency collapse. He interprets the concentration of gold in the United States and France as a consequence of this policy on the part of other countries. His conclusion: policy has only the choice between the gold standard and inflation; even the poorest country can and must hold to gold, because only this makes it possible to attract foreign capital.
Mises argues against the interpretation that the severe economic crisis proves the failure of capitalism. In his view, it was not the capitalist system that failed, but the anti-capitalist policy of interventionism, statism and socialism. He understands the market as the regulator of production: through the prices of goods, wages and interest, it brings supply and demand into balance. State interventions such as tariffs, cartels, wages forced up by trade unions and unemployment benefits suppress this function and produce permanent unemployment, unsaleability and capital consumption. The text reinterprets concepts such as unsaleability and unemployment as price phenomena. As evidence of the advance of this policy, Mises names Sidney Webb and the socialists of the chair (Kathedersozialisten). His conclusion: only more work and new capital formation, that is, a break with the anti-capitalist policy that has prevailed for decades, lead out of the crisis.
OriginalDeutsch
1931
The Psychological Roots of Resistance to Economic Theory
Original title·Die psychologischen Wurzeln des Widerstandes gegen die nationalökonomische Theorie
Human society in its ethno-sociological foundations, Volume 3: Emergence, change and formation of the economy in the light of ethnological research
Original title·Die menschliche Gesellschaft in ihren ethno-soziologischen Grundlagen, Band 3: Werden, Wandel und Gestaltung der Wirtschaft im Lichte der Völkerforschung
Review of: Richard Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en général, edited with an English translation and other material by Henry Higgs
Original title·Rezension zu: Richard Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en général, edited with an English translation and other material by Henry Higgs
In this short text, Ludwig Mises discusses the polemic against British protective tariffs that was written in 1931/32 under the editorial direction of Sir William Beveridge at the London School of Economics and appeared as a German edition under the title "Zölle, Lehrbuch des internationalen Handels". The occasion is Great Britain's departure from liberal economic policy and the transition to protectionism. Mises recounts how the authors examine and refute all the arguments of the protectionists, in doing so penetrating to the causes of the Great Depression. At the heart of the text is the thesis that every intervention in the market and price mechanism disrupts the economic order resting on private ownership of the means of production, because only changes in prices adjust supply and demand to one another. The rigidity of money wages and interest rates, Mises argues, prevented this adjustment and, by way of protectionism and inflation, ultimately ends in the call for a planned economy.
OriginalDeutsch
1932
Original title·Die Legende vom Versagen des Kapitalismus
The essay argues against the thesis, widespread in the wake of the Great Depression, that capitalism has failed and that the transition to socialism is inevitable. Mises counters that it is not capitalism but Interventionism and state and municipal socialism that have failed: the crisis, he argues, is the foreseeable consequence of decades of anti-capitalist and anti-liberal policy. The argument proceeds in three sections, beginning with the discovery of the laws of the market by social science (Hume, Adam Smith), moving through the effects of state intervention, and arriving at the situation of the entrepreneur in the interventionist state, where "connections" to politics come to matter more than cost-effective production. Mises sets the liberal doctrine apart from Marxism and Interventionism and concludes that the malfunctioning of the market caused by interventions in prices, wages and interest necessarily leads to crisis.
OriginalDeutsch
1932
Review: The Last Decades of a Great Power: People, Nations and Problems of the Habsburg Empire by Rudolf Sieghart
Original title·Rezension: Die Letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht: Menschen, Völker und Probleme des Habsburger-Reichs von Rudolf Sieghart
Ludwig von Mises argues that money is not a special case outside the general theory of value and price, but rather fits completely within it. The starting point is the threefold division of economic goods proposed by Knies into the means of production, of consumption, and of exchange. The text opposes the view that the value of money is 'imaginary' or merely conventional, and traces the subjectivist theory of value back to John Law. In five sections, Mises treats the value-forming service of money, the relationship between the stock of money and the demand for money together with a critique of the concept of the velocity of circulation, the changes in the value of money and the quantity theory, the money substitute (money certificate versus fiduciary media), as well as monetary calculation and the pseudo-problem of 'value stability'. Throughout, he sets the individualistic view of the market against the aggregate equation of exchange that he criticizes.
Ludwig von Mises examines whether theoretical insight into the causes of the change in the business cycle will in future lead to smaller fluctuations, and denies this with an argument drawn from economic policy, not from theory. His starting point is the circulation credit theory, which he describes as the prevailing one and according to which the credit expansion that triggers the upswing is always sustained by the desire for cheap money. Mises argues that a credit expansion merely announced as temporary must remain without effect, because entrepreneurs take on new business ventures only when low interest rates are expected to be permanent. He attributes the duration of the present crisis to rigid wages and price supports, and cautions against underestimating the lessons of the older Currency School. As an unsolved problem he identifies the effects of falling prices and the question whether progress and capital formation are possible only by an inflationary route.
OriginalDeutsch
1933
Particular Interests or the Common Good as the Aim of Economic Policy
Original title·Einzelinteressen oder Gemeinwohl als Ziel der Wirtschaftspolitik
Human society in its ethno-sociological foundations, Volume 5: Emergence, change and formation of law in the light of ethnological research
Original title·Die menschliche Gesellschaft in ihren ethno-soziologischen Grundlagen, Band 5: Werden, Wandel und Gestaltung des Rechtes im Lichte der Völkerforschung
Mises sketches the emergence and reach of the Austrian School of Economics and sets it within the context of the economic-policy relations between Austria and Hungary. The starting point is the classical political economy of Hume, Smith and Ricardo, which could not solve the problem of price formation, because the paradox of value between useful and costly goods stood in its way. Carl Menger, he argues, overcame this antinomy with marginal utility: what is valued is not the class of goods, but the specific partial quantity, judged by the last want that is satisfied. From the subjective valuations of consumers, the theory of imputation derives the prices of the means of production, wages, interest and entrepreneurial profit. Mises traces the effect of the doctrine through Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser, as well as through Jevons, Walras and Clark. His reason is a practical one: the men who conducted Austria's and Hungary's economic-policy negotiations had, he notes, emerged from Menger's school, so that both countries build on the same theoretical foundations.
This text is the preface that Ludwig von Mises wrote for the English edition of his work "The Theory of Money and Credit". Mises interprets the currency and banking policy of the early 1930s as a continuation of the same fundamental problems that had already shaped Great Britain's return to the old gold parity of the pound and the American prosperity of the years 1926 to 1929. He argues that the economic crisis was not to be blamed on the gold currency but on the preceding credit expansion, as well as on the political attempt to stabilize wages and prices by reducing the gold content of the currency unit. Against the idea of an index-based manipulation of purchasing power, he objects that every method of calculation favours particular interests and that the shaping of the value of money thereby becomes a plaything of politics. According to Mises, foreign-exchange controls and unilaterally imposed payment prohibitions had brought international credit transactions almost to a standstill.
Carl Menger's collected shorter writings on the method and history of economics bring together ten works published between 1884 and 1915. At their core stand Menger's interventions in the Methodenstreit against Gustav Schmoller, above all the polemic written in sixteen letters, “Die Irrthümer des Historismus in der deutschen Nationalökonomie” (The Errors of Historicism in German Economics), in which he defends the separation of theoretical, practical and historical research and rejects historicism as one-sided. A detailed review of Schönberg's “Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie” (Handbook of Political Economy) and the essays “Zur Theorie des Kapitals” (On the Theory of Capital) and “Grundzüge einer Klassifikation der Wirtschaftswissenschaften” (Outline of a Classification of the Economic Sciences) develop Menger's concept of exact economics, his real conception of capital and his system of the economic sciences. The collection closes with five biographical essays on Friedrich List, Lorenz von Stein, Wilhelm Roscher, John Stuart Mill and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.
OriginalDeutsch
1935
Export Promotion through Active Monetary Policy
Original title·Exportförderung durch aktive Währungspolitik
Human society in its ethno-sociological foundations, Volume 4: Emergence, change and formation of state and culture in the light of ethnological research
Original title·Die menschliche Gesellschaft in ihren ethno-soziologischen Grundlagen, Band 4: Werden, Wandel und Gestaltung von Staat und Kultur im Lichte der Völkerforschung
The volume gathers Carl Menger's writings on monetary theory and on the Austro-Hungarian currency reform. Its theoretical core is the article 'Geld' (Money) from the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (1909), which explains the origin of generally accepted media of exchange from the differing marketability of goods and defines money as a commodity whose distinctive character lies in its function as a medium of exchange. The remaining works deal with the currency reform of 1892: the purchasing power of the silver gulden, the question of the ratio in the transition to a gold currency, the danger of a gold agio, and Menger's statements before the Currency Enquiry Commission. Menger argues against an overly heavy gold crown and for a 'just gulden' without any shift in wealth. A complete catalogue of Menger's writings concludes the volume.
This study examines why the note issue became an exception to laissez-faire principles and why central banking was adopted in preference to free banking with competition in the issue of notes. Originally a 1935 doctoral dissertation written under Friedrich Hayek at the London School of Economics, the book first traces the banking histories of England, Scotland, France, the United States and Germany, showing how monopolies in the note issue arose largely from political motives and the needs of state finance. It then reviews the nineteenth-century theoretical debates in each country, grouping writers by their stance on the currency and banking schools and on central versus free banking. A concluding chapter reconsiders the main arguments for central banking, among them bank failures, cyclical instability, the lender of last resort, rational monetary policy and international cooperation. An appendix works through the clearing mechanism with arithmetical examples.
Ludwig von Mises reviews the concluding fourth volume of the collected edition of Carl Menger's writings, issued by the London School of Economics and edited by F. A. von Hayek; this volume brings together his works on monetary theory and currency policy. Among the items named are Menger's summary treatment of monetary theory of 1909 for the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (Concise Dictionary of Political Sciences), his essays on Austrian currency regulation, and his statements in the currency inquiry of 1892, supplemented by a bibliography of Menger's writings. Mises stresses that nothing in the volume of more than 300 pages is materially out of date, and cites as a current example the debate over the currency regulation of 1892, in which Menger was among the advocates of a stabilization of the gulden at its then prevailing value. The volume closes with a longer quotation from Menger's arguments against a devaluation, in which he rejects the "small gulden" as an exploitation of the common man and calls for a just gulden that favours neither creditor nor debtor.
OriginalDeutsch
1936
Memorandum on Exchange Stabilization and the Problem of Internal Planning
In this essay, Ludwig von Mises argues that economic and political liberalism stem from a single root and can endure only together. He interprets the market economy based on private property as a democratic order: property, in his view, is the result of a plebiscite of consumers, renewed each day, in which every penny represents a ballot. To this, in the constitution of the state, corresponds political democracy. The paradox of the present, he holds, lies in the fact that the democracy created by liberalism has decided against economic freedom and, through interventionism, statism and socialism, is at once undermining political democracy and civil liberties, moving towards dictatorship. In the second part, Mises discusses William E. Rappard's book "L'individu et l'état dans l'évolution constitutionnelle de la Suisse" (The Individual and the State in the Constitutional Evolution of Switzerland), which traces this development through the example of Switzerland from 1848 and 1874 down to the present-day crisis of statism.
Gottfried Haberler's "Prosperity and Depression" was produced as the first step of an inquiry, commissioned by the League of Nations, into the causes of recurring economic crises. The work pursues two aims: Part I systematically orders and examines the existing business cycle theories (the purely monetary theory, monetary and non-monetary over-investment theories, the acceleration principle, cost and over-indebtedness theories, under-consumption, psychological and harvest theories, as well as more recent debates around Keynes), while Part II develops from this a synthetic account of the nature and causes of the business cycle. Haberler arranges the theories according to upswing, upper turning point, downswing and lower turning point, and works out the interplay of endogenous and exogenous forces. A Part III deals with the multiplier, the acceleration principle, Hayek's Ricardo Effect, and price and wage rigidity. The guiding thesis is that many apparent contradictions between theories trace back to differing terminology.
Super-National Organization Held No Way to Peace: Radical Change in Political Mentalities and Social and Economic Ideologies Viewed as Necessary in Order to Eradicate Economic Nationalism
In this work, published in 1944, Ludwig von Mises analyses the rise and nature of German National Socialism and places it within a broader critique of Statism. His central thesis: Nazism is not a special path of German mentality, but the radical application of Interventionism and socialism to the situation of a densely populated nation that cannot do without imports and therefore seeks to conquer Lebensraum (living space). Mises traces the decline of German liberalism, the triumph of militarism and the transformation of Pan-Germanism into Nazism, and he treats Statism, nationalism, protectionism, autarky and anti-Semitism as interconnected phenomena. He argues that lasting peace is possible only in a free market economy, in which no economic causes of war exist, and he criticizes contemporary plans for world planning, federation and a league of nations as unworkable so long as nations adhere to Statism.
OriginalEnglish
Further editions
Im Namen des Staates: oder Die Gefahren des Kollektivismus1978
In "Bureaucracy" (1944), Ludwig von Mises examines the spread of bureaucratic administration as a symptom of the transition from a market economy to state control. His central thesis: bureaucracy is not bad in itself, but rather the necessary method wherever success cannot be calculated in monetary terms. Mises contrasts two organizational principles: the profit-oriented management of the entrepreneur, guided by economic calculation and the sovereignty of consumers, and the rule-bound bureaucratic management of public offices. From this contrast he concludes that private enterprises become bureaucratically rigid only through state intervention, and that socialist planning remains impossible to calculate for lack of market prices. Later chapters address the psychological and political consequences, such as the German youth movement, the selection of the dictator, and the decline of critical judgement. The examples are drawn mainly from Germany, France, Russia, and the United States of the New Deal era.
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Further editions
Die Bürokratie
OriginalDeutsch
1944
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior [with John von Neumann]
In this essay, Ludwig von Mises examines the cooperative movement and disputes its claim to be a distinct, superior way of organizing economic life. He argues that the ambitious original program, the producers' cooperatives of Owen, King, and Lassalle that were to abolish the wage system, failed completely, leaving only consumers' cooperatives and farmers' purchasing and marketing cooperatives. Mises contends that the capitalist market economy is itself social cooperation under the division of labor and that profit-seeking private business, not the cooperatives, drives economic improvement. He maintains that cooperatives sell above cost, earn profit like any firm, and survive chiefly through tax exemptions, cheap credit, and other government privileges rather than through superior efficiency. The closing sections treat the political and monopolistic ambitions of the movement and conclude that cooperatives can be justified only without such privileges.
OriginalEnglish
1947
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, 2nd. ed., revised and enlarged [with John von Neumann]
Original title·Spieltheorie und Wirtschaftliches Verhalten
Human Action is Ludwig von Mises' wide-ranging account of economics as part of a general science of human action that he calls praxeology. Its starting point is that human action is purposeful behaviour: the acting individual exchanges a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory one. From this category of action Mises derives the theorems purely deductively, from value, preference and marginal utility through money, interest, capital and entrepreneurial profit to business cycle theory. The work is divided into seven parts and sets out catallactics, the theory of the market society, in contrast to socialism and interventionism, whose consequences it analyses. The central argument against the socialist planned economy is the impossibility of rational economic calculation without market prices. Methodologically, Mises sharply distinguishes aprioristic praxeology from historicism, positivism and polylogism.
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Nationalökonomie: Theorie des Handelns und Wirtschaftens1940
OriginalDeutsch
Menschliches Handeln: Eine Grundlegung ökonomischer Theorie2010
The Significance of the Austrian School of Economics for Modern Economic Science, in Neue Beiträge zur Wirtschaftshistorie
Original title·Die Bedeutung der österreichischen Schule der Nationalökonomie für die modernen Wirtschaftswissenschaften, in Neue Beiträge zur Wirtschaftshistorie
In this essay Ludwig von Mises defines profit and loss as the result of entrepreneurial foresight within the market process: profit arises where an entrepreneur assesses future prices more correctly than others and acquires factors of production below their later value, loss from the reverse misjudgement. Part A develops the economic nature of profit and loss, their social function as the consumers' instrument of direction, and their calculation. Part B refutes the condemnation of profit: the equality argument, the poverty thesis, the moral condemnation of profit-seeking, and the static mode of thought of the mathematical economists. Part C presents the alternative as an either/or between capitalism and socialism, holding that no third system without entrepreneurial profit and loss is possible. The text refers to Marx, Engels and Lenin as opposing positions and engages with the logician L. Susan Stebbing.
OriginalEnglish
1951
The Awakening, Growing and Erring of the Human Mind: An Attempt at a Paleopsychology of Primitive Peoples Including the Archaic Stage and the Generally Human Traits
Original title·Des Menschengeistes Erwachen, Wachsen und Irren: Versuch e. Paläopsychologie von Naturvölkern mit Einschluss d. archaischen Stufe u.d. allgemein menschl. Züge
The collection of essays brings together seventeen speeches and articles by Ludwig von Mises from the years 1945 to 1965, arranged in four parts: the free market versus state planning, money and inflation, Mises as a critic of inflationism and socialism, as well as ideas. The guiding thesis is that there is no third order between a market economy and socialism: interventionism (price controls, minimum wages, credit expansion, progressive taxation) fails to achieve its intended goals and step by step leads into the planned economy of the German 'Zwangswirtschaft' (compulsory economy) pattern. Mises attributes rising real wages and prosperity solely to per-capita capital accumulation and criticizes Keynes, Say's Law and the misinterpretation of inflation as a mere rise in prices. The longest contribution, 'Profit and Loss', interprets entrepreneurial profit as the result of correct anticipation of future market conditions and as a steering mechanism that serves consumers.
The text is a letter by Ludwig von Mises from 1955 on the problem of cartels and monopolies. Mises agrees to the reprinting of his remarks from his 1927 book Liberalism, though for the complete treatment he refers to his work Human Action. His central thesis: without state intervention there would be no monopoly problem worth mentioning, because policy rhetorically combats cartels while at the same time creating the very preconditions for them through protective tariffs, foreign-exchange restrictions, and international agreements. As evidence he cites American antitrust practice against big business and an investigation against a grocery chain. He calls on sincere opponents of monopoly to begin by abolishing all coercive economic measures.
OriginalDeutsch
1955
Explodes Unification Fallacy (Review: How Can Europe Survive?, Hans F. Sennholz)
Ludwig M. Lachmann's 'Capital and Its Structure' (1956) develops a morphological theory of capital that breaks with the assumption that capital is a homogeneous magnitude measurable in money. Lachmann's starting point is the heterogeneity of capital goods: because each good can be put to only a limited range of uses (multiple specificity) and goods must be combined complementarily, the production plans of entrepreneurs form capital combinations whose totality is the capital structure of a society. In a world of unexpected change, these combinations are constantly dissolved and formed anew (capital regrouping). Methodologically, the book relies on process analysis rather than equilibrium analysis and on a subjectivist theory of expectations. In the application chapters, Lachmann reinterprets Böhm-Bawerk's 'roundabout production' as a theorem about economic progress, examines the asset structure (plan, control, and portfolio structure), and tests business cycle theory, linking the Hicksian approach with the Austrian theory of industrial fluctuations.
In this 1956 essay, Ludwig von Mises examines why capitalism, despite its material successes, is passionately rejected by many, especially by intellectuals. Mises traces this rejection psychologically to resentment: in a society of equality before the law, success is attributed to one's own merit, so that failure is experienced as a personal affront and projected onto a scapegoat, the market system. He develops the argument through particular groups (frustrated ambitions, intellectuals, white-collar workers, the idle heirs or "cousins", Broadway and Hollywood) and then examines the social philosophy of the common man, the position of literature under capitalism, and the non-economic objections (happiness, materialism, justice, liberty). Mises sharply distances himself from Marx, the socialists, and what he regards as a spurious anti-communism, and sets against this the order of the market economy as the sole foundation of prosperity and liberty.
Theory and History (1957) is Ludwig von Mises's principal methodological work. Its central thesis is methodological dualism: because human beings act purposively and are guided by ideas, the sciences of human action cannot be modeled on the experimental natural sciences. From this premise Mises distinguishes praxeology, the a priori theory of action whose best-developed branch is economics, from history and thymology, the understanding of individual valuations. The book proceeds in four parts: judgments of value, determinism and materialism (with an extended critique of Marxian dialectical materialism), the epistemological problems of history, and the philosophical interpretations of the historical course. Throughout, Mises argues against positivism, behaviorism, historicism, and scientism, and defends the autonomy of the sciences of human action against attempts to reduce them to the methods of physics.
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Theorie und Geschichte: Eine Interpretation sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Entwicklung
A programmatic essay by Ludwig von Mises on interventionism as an economic-policy programme between capitalism and socialism. Mises denies that interventionism represents a lasting third solution: in his account, state interventions in prices, wages, interest, and credit generate follow-on problems that compel further interventions, until complete socialism stands at the end. The argument proceeds from the market economy as Consumer Sovereignty, from the monetary Business Cycle Theory (credit expansion leads inevitably to crisis), and from the role of private property in the economic and cultural flourishing of the West. Mises draws on Engels's addendum to The Communist Manifesto, according to which interventionist measures necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and he distinguishes classical liberalism from the American usage of the word. The conclusion consists of a series of motto quotations on the state and the law.
Implications of the European Common Market and Free Trade Area Project for United States Foreign Economic Policy, in Compendium of Papers on United States Foreign Trade Policy
An Economic Review of the Patent System (1958) is Study No. 15, which Fritz Machlup prepared for the Patent Subcommittee of the US Senate. It brings together more than a century of economic writing on patents and arranges it systematically rather than chronologically. A historical part traces the spread of patents, the anti-patent movement (1850–1873) and the later victory of the patent advocates; an institutional part covers the requirements for patent protection, the abuse of the patent monopoly, compulsory licences and international patent relations. Most of the space goes to economic theory: Machlup examines the four classical justifications (natural law, reward through monopoly, the monopoly-profit incentive, and exchange for disclosure) and works with the concepts of private and social costs and values. His conclusion is deliberately open: on the basis of what was known at the time, neither the introduction nor the abolition of the patent system can be clearly justified; only judgements about gradual reforms are more reliable.
The encyclopaedia article traces the history of political liberalism from its beginnings in seventeenth-century England to its revival in the twentieth century. Hayek distinguishes two strands: the English tradition of the Whigs, which he defines through the three principles of freedom of opinion, the rule of law and private property, and the rationalist liberalism of the French Revolution, which replaces trust in the grown social order with trust in a plan devised by reason. A separate section deals with the brief political liberalism in Germany and its decline under Bismarck. The concluding part describes the decline of liberalism up to the First World War and its revival by authors such as Mises, Lippmann, Röpke and Eucken, whose new liberalism stresses the connection between economic and political order. This article from the Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften (1959) is Hayek's earlier, concise account; in 1973 he wrote, for the Enciclopedia del Novecento, an independent and considerably expanded English version ('Liberalism'), not a translation of this article but a later and more detailed re-treatment of the subject.
The encyclopaedia article "Markt" (Market) by Ludwig von Mises defines the market as the process by which, in an economy based on the division of labour, production is oriented towards the most urgent needs of consumers. The central thesis is the sovereignty of consumers: profit and loss steer control of the means of production into the hands of those who use them most effectively in the service of consumers. In six sections, Mises treats the market process, monopoly and competition, speculation as a fundamental feature of all economic activity, the unity of all sub-markets (the stock exchange, the labour market), profit and loss as a phenomenon of adjustment in relation to the stationary equilibrium, and the inequality of income and wealth as a result of consumer behaviour. He distinguishes his position from interventionist and socialist ones, and engages with Keynes's full-employment policy and with the demands of the "Communist Manifesto". The article concludes with a bibliography.
OriginalDeutsch
1959
Original title·Bemerkungen über die ideologischen Wurzeln der Währungskatastrophe von 1923
Mises reconstructs the intellectual origins of the German hyperinflation of 1923. His thesis: the catastrophe was not the result of unfortunate circumstances but rather the practical application of the doctrines of monetary policy that Lexis, Knapp, and Bendixen had formulated in the German Empire. At its core is an autobiographical retrospective on his disputes with representatives of the Historical School and the Verein für Sozialpolitik in the pre-war years. Mises recounts their objections to Böhm-Bawerk's theory of interest and to his own theory of money: the rejection of the Quantity Theory of Money, the distrust of gold-backed currency, the ideal of financial readiness for war. He describes how these positions dismissed every monetary explanation of the mark's depreciation as ridiculous. The frame of reference is provided by the opponents named in the text, Schmoller, Wagner, and Brentano, as well as Max Weber's struggle for value freedom in economics.
Ludwig von Mises defines economic liberalism as the market economy founded on private property in the means of production, in which the purchasing consumers decide on the quantity and quality of goods. The text grounds liberalism in economics: the division of labour dissolves the biological struggle of all against all into societal competition and creates a harmony of the rightly understood interests. In six sections, Mises treats the relationship between liberalism and science, the rise and decline of the liberal movement since England and Scotland, the question of special interests, the primacy of consumption together with a critique of administrative price-fixing, free trade, and the failed attempts at a renewal. Against Socialism and Interventionism he argues that their interventions are counterproductive and lead step by step into full central planning. Genuine neo-liberalism he associates with economists such as Cannan, Einaudi, Hayek and Röpke.
OriginalDeutsch
1959
Professor Shackle on the Economic Significance of Time
Ensayo de Hans F. Sennholz que sostiene que el monopolio estatal del dinero, sumado a las leyes de curso forzoso, es la causa última de la inflación y de la desintegración económica. La primera parte examina el Sistema de la Reserva Federal de los Estados Unidos, su dependencia del poder político y su papel como banco central del mundo. La segunda parte critica las soluciones que considera falsas: el manejo keynesiano de la demanda, la regla monetaria de los monetaristas en torno a Milton Friedman, las propuestas de los 'supply-siders' (Mundell, Laffer, Wanniski, Kemp) y las doctrinas del crédito social. La tercera parte defiende el patrón oro y propone, como meta final, la libertad monetaria: un patrón paralelo, la banca libre y la abolición del monopolio del dinero y del curso forzoso.
In this essay, Ludwig von Mises argues against the doctrine of the innate equality of all human beings and sharply distinguishes it from the natural-law principle of equality before the law. People are born with different talents, he maintains; what is decisive is how a society deals with this inequality. In the market economy, as the central thesis holds, the more able can put their superiority to use only by serving consumers, whereas pre-capitalist and socialist orders subject the masses to the few. Mises sets himself against the contempt for the common man in the critique of advertising and consumption, against the levelling of the education system, and against the mysticism of majority rule. Drawing on Marx, Trotsky, and David Hume, he defends representative government not as an expression of natural equality but as a peaceful means of changing those in power. The move away from socialism he identifies as the task of the rising generation.
OriginalDeutsch
1961
Original title·Kapitalbildung und die Lehre vom Wachstum
Ludwig von Mises argues that economic progress results solely from a more abundant supply of capital per capita, and he criticizes the more recent 'doctrine of growth'. This doctrine, he holds, borrows the concept of growth from biology and presents economic improvement as a mysterious process beyond human influence. Mises reads the doctrine of growth as a new phase in the campaign against saving and capital formation, in the tradition of Tugan-Baranovsky, Lederer, Foster and Catchings as well as Keynes, and as a means of disguising the failure of Soviet economic policy by means of questionable growth rates. He points to the increase in population, to the national products measured in money, and to the role of foreign capital investment in the spread of Western civilization. The essay closes with the thesis that only a progressive increase in the available capital goods can attain the aims of economic policy.
Amerika und die europäische Integration: Einige grundsätzliche Bemerkungen, in Aussenwirtschafts: Zeitschrift für Internationale Wirtschaftsbeziehungen
In this late work (1962), Ludwig von Mises sets out the epistemological foundations of the sciences of human action and argues against logical positivism. The central thesis: there is an unbridgeable dualism between the natural sciences, which study causality and regularity, and the sciences of action, whose fundamental category is finality, that is, action directed towards ends. Mises develops the category of action as the a priori basis of praxeology and history and distinguishes them from mathematics, geometry, and physics. He criticizes materialism, dialectical materialism of the Marxian stamp, behaviourism, the interpretation of statistics as law, as well as the macroeconomic and collectivist approach. The concluding chapters interpret positivism as the intellectual root of totalitarianism and of the crisis of Western civilization. Throughout, the argument proceeds deductively from the category of action; according to the preface, the work understands itself as a supplement to Mises's "Human Action" and "Theory and History".
OriginalEnglish
Further editions
Die Letztbegründung der Ökonomik: Ein methodologischer Essay
Man, Economy, and State is Murray N. Rothbard's systematic treatise on economic theory. Building from the action axiom and two subsidiary postulates, Rothbard deduces the whole corpus of economics step by step, moving from Crusoe economics and barter to indirect exchange, the pricing of consumers' goods, an integrated theory of production, capital and interest, factor pricing, and entrepreneurship. He advances a pure time-preference theory of interest synthesized with Frank Fetter's rent theory, rejects the prevailing short-run theory of the firm, and argues that monopoly price can arise only from a state grant of privilege. The final chapters apply praxeological analysis to coercive intervention: price control, taxation, inflation, business cycles, and government expenditure. The book includes Rothbard's preface, an extensive footnote apparatus, and a full bibliography.
Fritz Machlup's 1962 study is the first to measure systematically the economic scale of knowledge production in the United States. Machlup defines "knowledge" very broadly (anything that someone knows) and "production of knowledge" as any activity through which someone learns something previously unknown, so that creating, communicating and distributing coincide. After a conceptual clarification (Chapters I-III), he estimates the expenditure of five major knowledge industries: education, research and development, communication media (print, film, broadcasting, telephone, postal services), information machines and information services. Drawing on 84 statistical tables, he calculates for 1958 a knowledge expenditure of around 29 per cent of the adjusted gross national product and shows that this share has grown strongly since 1900. The closing chapter traces in parallel the shift in the occupational structure towards knowledge-producing work. Methodologically, the work combines national income accounting with a classification of types of knowledge and closes with a proposal for school reform.
OriginalEnglish
1962
The Question of National Defense: A Critique of Our Military Preparations and Policies
Israel M. Kirzner's Market Theory and the Price System, published in 1963, is an intermediate price-theory textbook for university teaching. Its guiding idea is to understand the market as a process of adjustment: market participants continually align their plans with the actions of others, and states of equilibrium appear not as ends in themselves but as limiting cases in which the market process comes to rest. Building on the theory of consumption and utility, the book develops across thirteen chapters the theory of demand, production, cost and supply, the determination of product and factor prices, the general market process, as well as monopoly, competition and the allocation of resources through the price system; an appendix treats multi-period planning. The presentation rests on a deliberately limited attention to perfect competition. In the preface Kirzner acknowledges his debt to Mises, Böhm-Bawerk, Menger and Wicksteed, and dedicates the work to Ludwig von Mises.
In this short monograph, first published in 1963, Murray N. Rothbard explains the origin and function of money and the consequences of government control over it. The first part derives money from the free market: as the most marketable commodity selected through indirect exchange, traded by weight, with private coinage and full-reserve warehousing. Rothbard argues that any supply of money suffices and that inflation, defined as money substitutes not backed by the metal stock, only redistributes wealth. The second part traces how government seizes the mint, debases coin, exploits Gresham's Law, charters central banks, and finally abandons the gold standard. A third part, added in 1974, narrates the monetary breakdown of the West in nine phases from the classical gold standard to the fluctuating fiat currencies after 1973.
Ludwig von Mises portrays the Austrian industrialist, farmer and agrarian-policy figure Siegfried von Strakosch (1867-1933), co-owner of the Hohenau sugar factory. The biographical essay links Strakosch's life, from his entry into the cloth industry through studies in the natural sciences in Vienna to his influence on economic policy, with an account of his thinking on agrarian policy. At its centre is Strakosch's position on the protective agricultural tariff: he read it not as a permanent institution but as a transitional and educational tariff, and saw in every further protective measure in favour of agriculture a step towards socialism. Mises discusses Strakosch's books, among them "Amerikanische Landwirtschaft" (American Agriculture), "Das Agrarproblem im Neuen Europa" (The Agrarian Problem in the New Europe) and "Der Selbstmord eines Volkes" (The Suicide of a People, 1922), and presents him as a representative of the Viennese haute bourgeoisie of the Franz Joseph era. A closing bibliographic note points to the private printing by his widow, Wally von Strakosch.
Ludwig von Mises argues that private ownership of the means of production in the market economy does not arise from force and appropriation, but from service to the consumer. He contrasts the seigneurial economic order, in which landholding lords depended on no market, with the market economy, in which consumers decide in a constant plebiscite who controls the means of production. Property thus appears as a social function that must be acquired anew each day. From this Mises derives the roots of modern liberties and civil rights: without a market economy, legal guarantees of freedom of the press or freedom of assembly would be worthless. In the final section he argues against the thesis that advertising renders the consumer defenceless, referring to Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders". The text announces a follow-up essay on monopolies.
Ludwig von Mises argues that the future of the dollar is inseparably bound up with the future of the democratic-republican form of government. His thesis: the welfare state cannot be financed from taxation alone and therefore depends on continued inflation. Drawing on the American electoral system, Mises shows how candidates promise voters benefits without visible costs (something for nothing) and how the budget deficit becomes a permanent condition. He documents the monetary policy with quotations from Keynes, Beardsley Ruml and A. B. Lerner, and interprets inflation as a deliberate fraud that only a circulating gold-coin currency (a gold currency of the Bamberger type) would quickly expose through Gresham's law. The text takes a clear position against deficit financing and against the policy of compulsory economy, which presents itself as liberal and progressive, and concludes that democracy and parliamentarism cannot endure in the long run without a gold currency.
As Assessment of the Current Relevance of the Theory of Comparative Advantage to Agricultural Production and Trade, in International Journal of Agrarian Affairs
A collection of studies by Jacques Rueff (Payot, 1966) devoted to the problem of the balance of payments. The central thesis is that, in the absence of inflation or a gold-exchange standard, a country's balance of payments tends automatically towards equilibrium through the interplay of prices, exchange rates and the discount rate, and not through government action. Rueff contrasts this analysis with Keynes's theory, according to which there exists a 'natural level' of exports that is difficult to alter. The first part brings together historical facts (the French and German trade balances from 1870 to 1931, reparations, the American deficit of the 1960s, the scarcity of the dollar) presented as evidence of a regulating mechanism. The second part outlines a monetary theory founded on the difference between actual and desired cash balances and on the role of credit and discounting. The author concludes that only effective monetary regulation, not planning, can restore the equilibrium of international settlements.
OriginalFrançais
1965
Survey and Appraisal of Proposed Schemes of Compensatory Financing
Ludwig von Mises argues that the alleged unstoppable tendency of capitalism towards the formation of monopolies is a misinterpretation. On a free market undisturbed by state intervention, a monopoly price diverging from the competitive price arises only in rare exceptions (Mises names diamonds and mercury). In fact, his thesis runs, it is governments that create monopolies in the first place: through tariffs that make national cartels possible, through direct monopoly-price legislation, and through intergovernmental commodity agreements. As evidence he cites American farm legislation, the contradictory antitrust policy of the United States, and the international coffee agreement, whose quota system he interprets as a state-enforced world cartel. The essay closes by contrasting political majority democracy with the consumer sovereignty of the market.
Ludwig von Mises argues that in the free market economy the consumer is sovereign: competition compels every line of production towards the point at which it satisfies consumers' most urgent wants. The monopoly price is the sole exception to this rule, yet it arises only under a particular configuration of the demand curve, and only rarely. The central thesis of the essay is that it is not the free market but governments that make the formation of monopoly prices possible, through import duties, cartel protection, patent and copyright law, agricultural price support, and agreements such as the International Coffee Agreement. Mises contrasts this with the Marxist fable of immiseration, which, he says, has been superseded by the doctrine of the monopolistic displacement of competition, and he criticizes American anti-trust policy for sharing Moscow's diagnosis of monopoly. As a remedy he names the removal of every import restriction.
The Foreign Exchange Market and the Stability of the Balance of Payments. A Theoretical Investigation, in Theorie der internationalen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen
Original title·Der Devisenmarkt und die Stabilität der Zahlungsbilanz. Eine theoretische Untersuchung, in Theorie der internationalen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen
Gottfried Haberler presents a systematic analysis of inflation in this study. He defines inflation as a sustained rise in prices, distinguishes it from deflation and depression, and differentiates creeping, trotting, and galloping inflation as well as open and suppressed inflation. The core of the argument is the thesis that no serious, sustained inflation occurs without a strong expansion of the money supply, which is why demand pull is more fundamental than cost push; at the same time he regards trade-union wage pressure as an independent factor that accelerates inflation. He examines competing interpretations of US inflation from 1955 to 1958 (Hansen, Selden, Galbraith, Means) and rejects the theory of administered prices. The conclusion covers the consequences of inflation, its relationship to growth and the business cycle, the US balance-of-payments deficit, and economic-policy recommendations drawn from monetary, fiscal, and competition policy.
OriginalEnglish
1966
Unity and Diversity in the Social Sciences: Festschrift for Alexander Mahr [Wilhelm Weber, Ed.]
Original title·Einheit und Vielfalt in den Sozialwissenschaften: Festschrift f. Alexander Mahr [Wilhelm Weber, Hrsg.]
Some Remarks on the Current Discussion of the International Monetary System, in Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
Original title·Einige Bemerkungen zur gegenwärtigen Diskussion über das internationale Währungssystem, in Jahrbuch für die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
ohne Titel), in: What’s Past Is Prologue. A Commemorative Evening to the Foundation for Economic Education on the Occasion of Leonard Read’s Seventieth Birthday
Ludwig von Mises traces the origins and intellectual environment of the Austrian School of Economics, beginning with Carl Menger's "Principles of Economics" (1871) and his early associates Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser. The essay describes the academic conditions at the Austrian universities, the liberal climate of the Habsburg constitution of 1867, and the special institutional role of the Privatdozenten. At its core lies the Methodenstreit: the conflict between the Austrian economists and the German Historical School around Gustav von Schmoller, which denied the possibility of universally valid economic theorems. Mises links this methodological dispute to Germany's political development, which he traces from Schmoller's social policy through Werner Sombart to National Socialism. Finally, he classifies the "Austrian School" as a nationally mislabelled chapter in the history of economic theory, one long since absorbed into general economics.
With the tools of praxeological economics, "Power and Market" analyses the effects of state intervention in the market and society. Murray N. Rothbard assigns every form of intervention to one of three types: autistic, binary, and triangular. For each he shows that it reduces the utility of those involved and misdirects resources. In the first chapter he argues that even defence and legal services could be provided through the market, so that the state would be superfluous. The middle chapters deal with price controls, monopoly privileges (licences, tariffs, patents, conservation laws), the incidence and effect of taxes, as well as government expenditure. The penultimate chapter criticizes anti-market ethics (equality, security, love of one's neighbour by coercion) as partly contradictory. The work, originally written as the concluding part of "Man, Economy, and State", first appeared in 1970.
This textbook develops a theory of the firm, the policy-making centre that decides what to produce, in what quantities, and by what combination of inputs. Shackle first sets out the orthodox apparatus of maximizing under full knowledge: the measurement of production, Leontief input-output matrices, production functions, cost and revenue curves, and the condition of marginal cost equal to marginal revenue first stated by Cournot. He then turns to his central theme, decision under uncertainty. Because investment commits durable equipment to an unknowable future, the businessman cannot rely on probability, which presupposes repeatable experiments. Shackle proposes instead potential surprise, ascendancy and focus values, and applies them to discounting, the scale of investment, borrowing, interdependent decision-making in duopoly, and bargaining as analysed by Edgeworth. A concluding chapter arranges the resulting concepts of profit and equilibrium into a single scheme.
OriginalEnglish
1970
The Errors of Constructivism and the Foundations of Legitimate Criticism of Social Structures
Original title·Die Irrtümer des Konstruktivismus und die Grundlagen legitimer Kritik gesellschaftlicher Gebilde
The International Monetary System: Some Recent Developments and Disscussions, in Approaches to Greater Flexibility of Exchange Rates, The Bürgerstock Papers
Three essays in which Ludwig Lachmann reassesses neglected parts of Max Weber's work for a praxeological theory of action and institutions. The first essay argues that Weber's ideal type is too wide to serve as the central concept of the social sciences and proposes to replace it with the plan: action derives its meaning from the design the actor carries in his mind, which makes interpretation (Verstehen) an observable, comparative study rather than intuition. The second essay builds, on foundations from Weber and Menger, a general theory of institutions, distinguishing designed from undesigned and fundamental from secondary institutions and treating the tension between coherence and flexibility. The third essay applies this scheme to Weber's political thought, his case for parliamentary government and his reading of Hohenzollern Germany and the Weimar Republic. Lachmann was Professor of Economics at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Murray N. Rothbard's essay argues that education is an individual, lifelong process of self-development, and that compulsory state schooling runs counter to this nature. Since people differ greatly in aptitude, pace and interests, individual instruction by the parents is the ideal, whereas state-mandated uniform instruction presses all children into a single mould. The first part develops this individualist theory of education and the fundamental question of whether the parents or the state have authority over the child. The second and third parts provide a historical account of compulsory schooling: from the Reformation (Luther, Calvin) through Prussia, France and England to fascism, National Socialism and communism, as well as its development in the United States from New England to "progressive education". Rothbard draws on Spencer, Isabel Paterson and Ludwig von Mises, and interprets state schooling as an instrument of standardization and of training in obedience.
OriginalEnglish
1972
A New History of Leviathan [ed. with Ronald Radosh]
In this Hobart Paper, published in 1973 by the Institute of Economic Affairs, Ludwig M. Lachmann examines the methodological dispute within macroeconomic capital and growth theory. His central thesis: both major camps, the neo-Ricardian 'Cambridge' school (Robinson, Sraffa, Kaldor) and the neoclassical formalists (Samuelson, Solow, Hicks), have lost sight of the microeconomic foundations of economic action. Lachmann argues that equilibrium thinking misses the real market process: profits, he holds, are a disequilibrium phenomenon; a uniform 'normal' rate of profit and 'steady-state growth' are fictions; and technical progress is, in principle, a source of disequilibrium. He works this out chapter by chapter, treating profit, interest, growth and innovation in turn, and draws conclusions for income, growth and monetary policy. Methodologically he appeals to subjectivism and divergent expectations, setting the work against the aggregate formalism of his time.
In America's Great Depression (first published 1963) Murray N. Rothbard applies Ludwig von Mises's monetary theory of the business cycle to the United States slump of 1929. The thesis runs counter to the prevailing view: the depression was not a failure of laissez-faire capitalism but the consequence of prior government and Federal Reserve intervention. Part I sets out the Austrian cycle theory, arguing that bank credit expansion distorts the structure of production and makes a corrective recession inevitable, and rebuts Keynesian, underconsumptionist, acceleration-principle and Schumpeterian alternatives. Part II documents the inflationary boom of 1921 to 1929, tracing reserve growth, acceptance and securities policy, and the Federal Reserve's cooperation with the Bank of England. Part III examines the contraction of 1929 to 1933, presenting Herbert Hoover as an interventionist who propped up wage rates, expanded public works and farm supports, and thereby prolonged the depression. An appendix estimates the rising fiscal burden of government on private product.
In this manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard sets out the libertarian position: every human being owns himself and whatever he appropriates from unowned nature through labour, from which follow free exchange, unrestricted private property, and the non-aggression axiom. The state here appears as the central, institutionalized violator of rights, acting in a systematically aggressive manner through taxation, conscription, and war and legitimizing its rule with the help of a caste of intellectuals. After this theoretical part, Rothbard applies the principle to specific contested issues: education, welfare, inflation and the business cycle, roads and police, the courts, the environment, and foreign policy, in each case with the proposal to replace state services with private, market-based solutions. The work closes with a strategy for disseminating the doctrine. It first appeared in 1973.
Volume 2 of Murray Rothbard's narrative history "Conceived in Liberty" treats the American colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century, the era of British "salutary neglect" that conventional textbooks dismiss as uneventful. Rothbard argues the reverse: this was the period in which colonial Assemblies used their control of the purse to wrest power from royally appointed governors, while lax enforcement of mercantilist restrictions under Walpole and Newcastle left the colonies virtually self-governing. The book first surveys developments in the separate colonies (land tenure, slavery, the rise of Franklin, Quaker abolitionism, the Paxton Boys) and then turns to intercolonial currents: paper-money inflation, freedom of the press, the Great Awakening, the growth of Deism, and the spread of English libertarian thought. A final part examines the conflict between Assembly and governor, mercantilist trade policy, and the imperial wars from King George's War through the French and Indian War, reading events through the recurring contest of Liberty against Power.
Conceived in Liberty is Murray N. Rothbard's narrative history of colonial and revolutionary America, comprising four original volumes (1975-1979). Rothbard states his guiding theme explicitly: history as a recurring conflict between liberty ("social power," voluntary interaction) and state power, following Albert Jay Nock and Lord Acton. Volume 1 covers the seventeenth-century founding of the colonies, volume 2 the "salutary neglect" of the early eighteenth century, volume 3 the mounting resistance from the French and Indian War to Lexington and Concord, and volume 4 the Revolutionary War and its aftermath. The method is deliberately detailed narrative rather than compressed summary, organized by colony and by period, so that the reader can weigh the events directly. Each volume closes with a bibliographical essay, and a combined preface explains the project's libertarian and methodological premises, citing Ludwig von Mises's Theory and History.
OriginalEnglish
1976
Essays on Hayek [with William F. Buckley, Jr. and five others, Fritz Machlup ed.]
Murray Rothbard's essay "Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics" (1976) sets out the praxeological method as the hallmark of the Austrian School. Starting from the Axiom of Action (human beings act in a goal-directed manner), Rothbard derives central implications: purposefulness, the means-ends relation, time, uncertainty and scarcity. He explains why verbal rather than mathematical deduction is used, and discusses the epistemological status of the axioms, contrasting Mises's Kantian a priori position with his own Aristotelian-empirical reading. He then distinguishes praxeology from technology, psychology, history and ethics, and develops Mises's critique of econometrics and quantitative economics. The text draws on numerous citations from Mises, Hayek, Say, Senior, Cairnes and Schütz.
The World Economy and the International Monetary System in the Period Between the Two World Wars, in Währung und Wirtschaft in Deutschland 1876-1975
Original title·Die Weltwirtschaft und das internationale Währungssystem in der Zeit zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen, in Währung und Wirtschaft in Deutschland 1876-1975
Commentaries to The Eurocurrency Market, Exchange Rate Systems, and National Financial Policies, in Eurocurrencies and the International Monetary System
This collection brings together the scattered essays in which the American economist Frank A. Fetter (1863-1949) developed his theory of distribution. At its centre is Fetter's unified theory of capital, interest, and rent: he understands rent as the price of the separable uses of any durable factor of production, and interest solely as an expression of time preference, by which future rents are discounted to their present capital value. The three parts (the theory of capital, of interest, and of rent) consist of journal articles and reviews, often in critical engagement with Böhm-Bawerk, John Bates Clark, Irving Fisher, and Alfred Marshall. A recurring theme is Fetter's attack on the productivity theory of interest and on the special status of land in the theory of rent.
«Notes and Recollections» is the autobiographical work of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), written in 1940 during his emigration in Geneva and published posthumously from his papers in 1978. Mises describes his intellectual development from initial statism to his turn against the German historicism of the Schmoller school, his encounter with Carl Menger's «Principles of Economics», and his work within the Austrian School of Economics around Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser. At the centre stand the genesis of his monetary and business cycle theory, his doctrine of the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, and his critique of interventionism. He also reports on his practical work at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, on the struggle against Bolshevism and inflation in post-war Austria, on the Vienna Private Seminar, and on his later teaching in Geneva. The account is marked by deep cultural pessimism: as he himself writes, Mises sees himself not as a reformer but as a «historian of decline».
F. A. Hayek's "Law, Legislation and Liberty" brings together the three volumes originally published separately: Rules and Order (1973), The Mirage of Social Justice (1976) and The Political Order of a Free People (1979). Hayek sets out to show that a society of free people rests on three insights: that a self-generating (spontaneous) order and a consciously directed organization are fundamentally different and follow different kinds of rules; that 'social' or distributive justice has meaning only within an organization, but is empty and inapplicable in the spontaneous order of the 'Great Society'; and that the prevailing form of representative democracy, in which the same assembly both makes law and governs, leads inevitably to a totalitarian interest-group state. Against what he calls 'constructivist rationalism' (Descartes, Hobbes), Hayek sets an evolutionary tradition (Hume, Smith, Menger). Volume 3 culminates in the design of a model constitution with separate legislative and governing bodies.
OriginalEnglish
Further editions
Recht, Gesetz und Freiheit: Band I: Regeln und Ordnung1973
In six lectures held in Buenos Aires in 1959, Ludwig von Mises explains the fundamentals of the market economy to a lay audience. The first lecture interprets capitalism as mass production for the needs of the masses and traces the rise in living standards to capital accumulation. There follow socialism as central planning without economic calculation, interventionism illustrated by failing price controls, inflation as a deliberate money-supply policy with unequal distributive effects, and the role of foreign investment in the development of poorer countries. The closing lecture connects the decline of constitutional government with the rule of interest groups and compares the situation to the Roman Empire as it disintegrated under interventionism and inflation.
Conceived in Liberty is Murray N. Rothbard's narrative history of colonial America and the American Revolution, originally comprising four volumes. Beginning with Europe at the close of the Middle Ages, the work traces the founding and growth of the thirteen colonies through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and culminates in the Revolutionary War of 1775 to 1784. Rothbard's organizing theme, stated in the preface, is the recurring conflict between liberty and state power, drawing on Albert Jay Nock's distinction between social power and state power and on Lord Acton's moral emphasis. The account restores the detailed factual narrative that Rothbard argues survey textbooks have squeezed out, covering land tenure, mercantilist restrictions, religious dissent, paper-money inflation, and the military and political history of the Revolution, including the drive toward the Articles of Confederation.
Two essays by Murray Rothbard, published together in 1979. The first, 'The Mantle of Science,' argues that scientism, the uncritical transfer of the methods of the physical sciences to the study of human action, is itself unscientific because it denies individual consciousness and free will. Rothbard criticizes mechanical analogies (servomechanism, model-building, measurement, the use of mathematics) and organismic analogies that treat collectives such as 'society' as acting entities. The second essay, 'Praxeology as the Method of the Social Sciences,' presents the axiomatic-deductive method that Ludwig von Mises called praxeology, grounded in the axiom of purposive human action, and contrasts it with positivism. Rothbard traces this tradition through Say, Senior, Cairnes, Menger, and Böhm-Bawerk, and defends methodological individualism with reference to Weber, Hayek, and Schutz.
Conceived in Liberty is Murray N. Rothbard's multi-volume narrative history of the British colonies in North America and of the American Revolution. As he explains in the Preface, Rothbard seeks to recover the narrative factual level of history that is lost in the usual textbooks, and he organizes the material around the perennial conflict he regards as central: that between Liberty and Power, between society and the state. Volume 1 covers the seventeenth century and the founding of the colonies; Volume 2 the first half of the eighteenth century under 'salutary neglect'; Volume 3 the road to revolution from 1760 to 1775; and Volume 4 the Revolutionary War together with its political and financial history. Methodologically, Rothbard explicitly draws on Ludwig von Mises (Theory and History), Lord Acton, and Albert Jay Nock. The account is arranged chronologically and colony by colony, and is furnished with extensive bibliographical essays in each volume.
The Primacy of Entrepreneurial Discovery, in Institute of Economic Affairs, [Readings 23] Prime Mover of Progress: The Entrepreneur in Capitalism and Socialism
This collection brings together the contributions to a conference held in 1981 at New York University to mark the 100th anniversary of Ludwig von Mises's birth. Eighteen essays and formal comments, arranged into nine essay-comment pairs plus an introduction, address four areas of Misesian economics: the choice of economic method, the nature of human action, the character of the market process, and the Misesian system as a framework for applied theory. Recurring points of dispute are subjectivism (from Menger through Mises to Shackle), aprioristic praxeology in the light of Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programmes, the relationship between equilibrium and the market process, the theory of entrepreneurship, as well as theories of monopoly, interventionism, and money. The contributors include, among others, James M. Buchanan, Ludwig M. Lachmann, Murray N. Rothbard, Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Leland B. Yeager, and Israel M. Kirzner. The volume documents the internal diversity and the open controversies of the modern Austrian School around 1980.
Murray Rothbard's "The Ethics of Liberty" (1982) develops a systematic theory of liberty grounded in natural law, at the core of which lies the principle of self-ownership and original appropriation (homesteading). From the concept of property, Rothbard deductively derives a complete libertarian system of law: the theory of property and crime, of contracts as the transfer of ownership, and of punishment and proportionality, as well as the rights of children. The work is divided into five parts, ranging from the natural-law foundation, through a theory of liberty developed on the Crusoe model and a critique of the state, to an engagement with alternative theories of liberty (Mises, Hayek, Berlin, Nozick) and a strategy for bringing about a free society.
State Spending for Productive Jobs? On the Effects of Employment Programs, Orientierungen zur Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik
Original title·Staatsausgaben für produktive Arbeitsplätze? Über die Wirkungen von Beschäftigungsprogrammen, Orientierungen zur Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik
Uncertainty, Discovery and Human Action: A Study of the Entrepreneurial Profile in the Misesian System, in Israel M. Kirzner, ed., Method, Process and Austrian Economics: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises
Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that causal-scientific, predictive social research is logically impossible. At its core lies the demonstration that the claim to conduct causal research as a social scientist stands in contradiction to the a priori valid proposition, which cannot be disputed in argument, that human beings can learn. From this Hoppe draws two consequences: as an empirical discipline, social research can proceed only by reconstruction, in analogy to the grammar of a language; alongside it, an aprioristic science of action is possible, whose model is economics. The first chapter develops the impossibility thesis using the example of regression analysis and the constancy principle; the second grounds sociology as a reconstructive grammar of action; the third grounds economics as an a priori science and illustrates it through the marginal utility theorem, the law of returns, and business cycle theory. Hoppe explicitly builds on Mises and the Austrian School and engages with Popper, Hume, and Kant.
Murray Rothbard's essay, published in 1984, reads American foreign and monetary policy from the Civil War to the Reagan era as a history of competing financial elites, above all the House of Morgan and the Rockefeller interests. With methodological individualism and a libertarian class analysis, Rothbard traces presidents, cabinet members and diplomats back to their banking and corporate connections, from Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt through Wilson's entry into the war in 1917 and the founding of the Federal Reserve to the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. The thesis: it is not party affiliation but the financial ties of a regime that determine its course, and investment bankers are structurally inclined towards statism. The argument draws on Austrian business cycle theory and the revisionist economic history of Gabriel Kolko.
OriginalEnglish
1984
Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution and Economic Significance, Volume III: The Economics of Information and Human Capital
Hans F. Sennholz's Money and Freedom (1985) argues that sound money and banking are, in his phrase, not impossible but merely illegal. The book makes the case for monetary freedom: repealing legal tender laws, abolishing the Federal Reserve's money monopoly, and permitting competing currencies so that individuals may choose the medium of exchange they trust. After an introduction on the world dollar standard and mounting international debt, Part I locates the causes of economic disintegration in central banking and legal tender coercion. Part II criticizes the prevailing reform schools as false solutions: the monetarists around Milton Friedman, the supply-siders (Mundell, Laffer, Wanniski, Kemp) who favor a managed gold-price rule, and the social credit movement. Part III sets out the author's alternative, a parallel standard built on freedom of choice, drawing on the gold standard tradition and proposals by F. A. Hayek and Ron Paul.
OriginalEnglish
Further editions
Moneda y libertad
OriginalEspañol
Pieniadze I Wolnosc
1985
Rivalry and Central Planning. The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered
In five self-contained studies and an appendix, Hans-Hermann Hoppe develops the thesis that normative theories of society can be rigorously justified and that the only justifiable order is individualist private-property anarchism, which Hoppe equates with a hundred-percent capitalism, or a pure Private Law Society. He argues that the existence of a state, even a liberal minimal state, can be justified neither morally nor economically, because it rests on coercive taxation. The argument is grounded in the principle of the exclusion of force and the right to original appropriation. The studies address the justifiability of norms, the theory of social welfare and welfare measurement, the foundations of property theory, and a theory of economic and state orders. In doing so, Hoppe engages with the tradition of political theory reaching from Hobbes to Nozick, with the theory of public goods, and with Hume's theory of property; the book appeared in 1987.
The Fatal Conceit argues that human civilisation rests on what Hayek calls the extended order of human cooperation, commonly named capitalism, an order that arose not by deliberate design but through the evolutionary selection of traditional moral practices governing property, honesty, contract and exchange. Hayek contends that socialism rests on a factual error: the belief that reason can consciously design or replace this order. The book holds that morals stand between instinct and reason, that they are learnt rather than invented, and that the dispersed knowledge coordinated by market prices cannot be gathered by any central authority. Across nine chapters it traces the origins of liberty and property, the evolution of trade, the rationalist revolt against tradition, the role of money and language, the relation between population growth and the market order, and the function of religion in preserving tradition. The work engages thinkers from Aristotle to Keynes, Einstein and Marx.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe develops a systematic theory of socialism and capitalism on the basis of a theory of property. He defines socialism as institutionalised aggression against private property, and capitalism as a system founded on original appropriation and contractual exchange; real societies lie to varying degrees between the two poles. Building on the 'natural theory of property', the work analyses four varieties of socialism: the Russian (Marxist) style, the social-democratic redistributive style, the socialism of conservatism, and that of social engineering. For each it derives a relative impoverishment effect. The argument is largely deductive, with illustrative comparisons such as West and East Germany; separate chapters are devoted to the ethical justification of capitalism, the social-psychological theory of the state, and the problems of monopoly and public goods. The book names Murray N. Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises in particular as its declared points of reference.
The anthology gathers 47 short essays, lectures, and reviews by Ludwig von Mises that appeared between 1942 and 1973 in periodicals such as The Freeman, National Review, and Christian Economics. In four parts it treats economic freedom (PART I), interventionism (PART II), Mises as a critic of the works of others (PART III), and the relationship between economics and ideas (PART IV). Recurring theses are consumer sovereignty in the market economy, the role of saving and capital formation in raising wages, the destructive effect of inflation and credit expansion, and the critique of Marx and Keynes. Mises argues that interventionism is not a third way between capitalism and socialism but leads inevitably to socialism. Each contribution is accompanied by its original source as a reference.
The Meaning of Market Process, in A. Bosch, P. Koslowski, and R. Veit, eds., General Equilibrium or Market Process: Neoclassical and Austrian Theories of Economics
The Market Process: An Austrian View in K. Groenveld, J.A.M. Maks, and J. Muysken, eds., Economic Policy and the Market Process, Austrian and Mainstream Economics
Carl Menger and the Subjectivist Tradition in Economics (translated from original English text contributed expressly for this volume), in Horst Claus Recktenwald, ed., Carl Mengers wegweisendes Werk
Original title·Carl Menger und die subjektivistische Tradition in der Ökonomie (translated from original English text contributed expressly for this volume) in Horst Claus Recktenwald, eds. Carl Mengers wegweisendes Werk
This essay collection by Israel M. Kirzner brings together thirteen contributions on the modern Austrian School of Economics. Its central thesis is that the market should be understood as a systematic process of discovery, sustained by entrepreneurial alertness, which closes gaps in knowledge and thereby produces a tendency towards coordination that is never complete yet always at work. Kirzner positions this approach as a 'middle way' between neoclassical equilibrium economics and the radically subjectivist critique, and defends it against objections from Loasby, Kregel, Buchanan and Vanberg. Part I develops the theory of the market process; Part II traces the emergence of the Austrian view from Menger to Mises and Hayek; Part III treats the knowledge problem, the price system and welfare economics; Part IV is devoted to self-interest as well as to property and justice in capitalism. Several chapters appeared earlier in Festschriften, reference works and journals, here brought together and framed.
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1992
Songs of the Mises-Kreis
Original title·Wiener Lieder zu Philosophie und Ökonomie
Fifteen essays by Hans-Hermann Hoppe on the economics and philosophy of private property, dedicated to his teacher Murray N. Rothbard. The economic part covers the theory of public goods, taxation, money and banking, Marxist and Austrian class analysis, a Misesian critique of Keynes, and the question of the possibility and consequences of fiat money. The philosophical part establishes praxeology as the foundation of epistemology, criticises causal-scientific methods in the social sciences, and develops an a priori justification of private property grounded in argumentation ethics. Throughout, Hoppe argues deductively from the concept of action, in the tradition of Mises and Rothbard. An appendix replies to four critical responses to his argumentation ethics. The essays appeared previously as individual pieces, including in the Journal of Libertarian Studies and the Review of Austrian Economics.
The Pure Time Preference Theory of Interest: An Attempt at Clarification, in J.M. Herbener, ed., The Meaning of Ludwig von Mises: Contributions in Economics, Sociology, Epistemology, and Political Philosophy
This volume collects twenty-one essays by Ludwig M. Lachmann, written between 1936 and 1991, that develop a radically subjectivist version of Austrian economics. Two themes recur: the meaning that institutions such as money, law and financial markets hold for the acting individuals who orient their plans around them, and the necessarily divergent expectations that drive trading in asset markets. Part I treats uncertainty, liquidity preference and the business cycle, including Lachmann's argument for a distinct 'secondary depression'. Part II elaborates the heterogeneity of capital and investment repercussions. Part III revisits the Austrian decline of the 1930s, among others the Hayek-Sraffa controversy and the dispute with Knight over capital. Part IV applies subjectivism to Menger, Mises, Shackle and the interpretation of institutions, closing with a programmatic case for a hermeneutic economics.
In "The Case Against the Fed" argues Murray N. Rothbard that the Federal Reserve is the sole institutional source of chronic price inflation in the United States, and that the system should be abolished. The book proceeds in two parts. First, Rothbard develops a theory of money, deriving it from market exchange and gold, and then frames fractional-reserve banking as a form of legalized counterfeiting that inflates the money supply, redistributes wealth from late to early receivers of new money, and generates booms and busts. Second, he gives a revisionist history of how a banking cartel, led by the Morgan and Rockefeller interests, engineered the Fed during the Progressive Era, culminating in the 1910 Jekyll Island meeting and the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The work closes with a concrete proposal to liquidate the Fed and return to a gold-coin standard. It draws explicitly on Austrian monetary theory.
OriginalEnglish
1994
Expectations and the Meaning of Institutions: Essays in Economics by Ludwig M. Lachmann
The Limits of the Market: The Real and the Imagined, in W. Moschel, M. Streit and U. Witt, eds., Marktwirtschaft und Rechtsordnung: Festschrift zum 70, Geburtstag von Prof. Dr. Erich Hoppmann
The Arguments Must Lead to Victory. An Enigmatic Interview with Professor Ludwig von Mises, in: liberal, Vierteljahreshefte der Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung
Original title·Die Argumente müssen zum Sieg führen. Ein rätselhaftes Interview mit Professor Ludwig von Mises, in: liberal, Vierteljahreshefte der Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung
The volume gathers four essays by Israel M. Kirzner on the theory of capital and interest, written in the subjectivist tradition of Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises. At its core stands 'An Essay on Capital' (1966), which defines capital not through physical properties but through the position of goods within multi-period individual plans; in it Kirzner criticises the views of Knight, Haavelmo, and Hicks, as well as the treatment of capital, waiting time, and the measurement of capital. The remaining essays address Mises's contribution to the theory of capital and interest and defend the pure time-preference theory of interest (Fetter, Mises) against productivity-based objections, with reference to the Cambridge controversy and Samuelson's rice example. Kirzner explicitly assigns his approach to the Austrian School and sets it apart from the Fisherian productivity interpretation of interest.
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1996
Governments, Firms, and the Critique of Centralized Economic Planning
Ten lectures and memoranda that Mises wrote mostly during his first years after emigrating to the United States (1940 to 1944). Their common theme is international reconstruction after the Second World War. Mises traces the catastrophe of the war back to the economic nationalism of the interwar period and argues that lasting peace and prosperity are possible only through a return to free trade, private property, and a monetary system tied to gold. Among the topics addressed are the economic situation of post-war Europe, a non-inflationary proposal for a 100 per cent gold cover, a pan-European union, guidelines for the reconstruction of Austria, an Eastern European federation, and Mexico's development problems.
The Irrepressible Rothbard collects the journalistic essays and columns that Murray N. Rothbard wrote for The Rothbard-Rockwell Report between 1990 and 1995. The pieces argue for a radical, anti-state libertarianism allied with the Old Right and with paleoconservatism, set against what Rothbard calls the ruling elite and its neoconservative and social-democratic apologists. The opening essays lay out a strategy of right-wing populism; later sections turn to electoral politics, the Gulf War and U.S. foreign intervention, the post-Cold War nationalities question, the culture war, feminism, the Clinton administration, and a closing run of film reviews. Throughout, Rothbard tests each policy and politician against one standard: whether it moves toward or away from liberty. The volume gathers short, polemical commentary rather than the formal economic treatises for which he is otherwise known.
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2000
The Logic of Freedom. A Ludwig von Mises Breviary (ed.)
Original title·Logik der Freiheit. Ein Ludwig-von-Mises-Brevier (Hrsg.)
In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe advances a revisionist comparison of monarchy, democracy, and a stateless "natural order" grounded in private property. Reconstructing monarchy as privately owned government and democracy as publicly owned government, he argues that the historic transition from kings to elected rulers raised time preference, encouraged capital consumption, and amounts to civilizational decline rather than progress. The thirteen self-contained chapters, most developed from conference papers, treat taxation, debt, inflation, war, redistribution, centralization and secession, socialism and privatization, immigration and free trade, conservatism and libertarianism, and the impossibility of limited government. Throughout, Hoppe draws explicitly on Austrian economic theory and on Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard, presenting the argument as praxeological rather than empirical. He proposes secession, privatization, and the delegitimation of democratic rule as the route toward a private law society.
Forty-one articles, memoranda, and essays the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote between 1918 and 1938, most of them drawn from his papers seized by the Gestapo in Vienna and later recovered from a Moscow archive. The pieces address the monetary collapse and hyperinflation that followed the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the design of central banking and currency reform, the fiscal and interventionist policies of interwar Austria, and the deepening crisis of the Great Depression. Further essays defend the gold standard against managed-currency proposals, criticize autarky and economic nationalism, restate the method of the social sciences, and renew Mises's argument that rational economic calculation is impossible under socialist central planning. A Soviet polemic against Mises closes the volume as an appendix.
Murray Rothbard reconstructs the monetary and banking history of the United States from the colonial era to the Second World War and interprets it consistently through the lens of Austrian monetary theory. In doing so, he deliberately sets himself apart from the quantitative-positivist 'new economic history' and from Friedman and Schwartz's "A Monetary History". Rather than collecting money-supply statistics, Rothbard inquires into motives and beneficiaries and reveals which financial interests stood behind paper-money issues, the First and Second Bank of the United States, the National Banking System and the founding of the Federal Reserve. The work consists of five parts, originally published separately: colonial to pre-twentieth-century monetary history, the origins of the Federal Reserve, the Fed from Hoover to Roosevelt amid the struggle between Morgan and Rockefeller interests, the gold-exchange standard of the interwar period, and the international monetary policy of the New Deal up to Bretton Woods. A recurring thesis is that Gresham's Law, fractional-reserve banking and state-backed bank cartels produced inflation and crises.
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2002
Thought to Death. Why Intellectuals Destroy Our World
Original title·Totgedacht. Warum Intellektuelle unsere Welt zerstören
William Tell against Leviathan, Part I (The Attack on Bank Client Secrecy – Desperate Blow of the Welfare Ideologues), in: Schweizerzeit
Original title·Wilhelm Tell gegen Leviathan, Teil I (Der Angriff aufs Bankkundengeheimnis – Verzweiflungsschlag der Wohlfahrts-Ideologen), in: Schweizerzeit
This collection of essays challenges two widely held assumptions: that every monopoly harms consumers, and that the production of security must nonetheless remain reserved to the state monopoly. The eleven essays argue that the second claim is false and that protection, like any other good, can be produced privately and competitively. Building on Gustave de Molinari, to whom the volume is dedicated, and on Murray Rothbard, the authors address the historicity of the state, monarchy and democracy in relation to war, nuclear proliferation, mercenaries, militias and guerrillas, privateering in naval warfare, as well as insurance models of private defence and the role of secession. The argument combines Austrian economics, public choice theory and historical case studies, and is directed against the Hobbesian justification of the state as guarantor of security.
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2003
Does Austrian Business Cycle Theory Help Explain the Dot-Com Boom and Bust? (mit Gene Callahan)
Is There a Medicine Against the Reform-Backlog Fever? Short Paper, Presented at the Symposium "Task and Significance of Liberal Journalism" at the Conference of the Friedrich August von Hayek Society
Original title·Gibt es eine Medizin gegen das Reformstau-Fieber? Kurzreferat, ausgelegt beim Symposion „Aufgabe und Bedeutung liberaler Publizistik“ bei der Tagung der Friedrich-August-von-Hayek-Gesellschaft
The Writing on the Wall for Intellectual Death. How the Western World Destroys Its Values and Liberties (Laudation on the Hoppe Affair), in: eigentümlich frei 51
Original title·Menetekel für den geistigen Tod. Wie die westliche Welt ihre Werte und Freiheiten zerstört (Laudatio zur Hoppe-Affäre), in: eigentümlich frei 51
The Money of Bondage and the Money of Freedom, in: Trade Fair Programme Booklet for the International Trade Fair for Precious Metals + Commodities 2005 in Munich (Publisher: GoldSeiten.de),
Original title·Das Geld der Knechtschaft und das Geld der Freiheit, in: Messeprogramm-Heft für die Internationale Fachmesse für Edelmetalle + Rohstoffe 2005 in München (Herausgeber: GoldSeiten.de),
The volume collects five works by Ludwig von Mises on money, credit, and the business cycle, written between 1923 and 1946. At its centre stands the circulation credit theory of the business cycle: boom and crisis arise when banks artificially push the money rate of interest below the natural rate by expanding uncovered fiduciary media, which leads to malinvestments and an inevitable downturn. Mises applies this theory to the German inflation of the early 1920s, the stabilization debates surrounding Fisher and Keynes, and the Great Depression. He criticizes plans for a 'stable' value of money and for index standards, defends the gold standard, and attributes the duration of the crisis to interventions in wages, prices, and interest rates. The essays argue that only free market prices and the avoidance of credit expansion can moderate the cyclical fluctuations.
Murray N. Rothbard recounts the history of the American 'Old Right', a loose coalition of opponents of the New Deal at home and of intervention abroad, and of its displacement by a 'New Right' marked by anti-communism and militarism. The central thesis: it was not the neoconservatives but already the founding of National Review in 1955 that turned the old, market-liberal and isolationist right wing into its opposite, a 'revolution within the form'. Rothbard combines this intellectual history with a partial autobiography: from Mencken, Nock, Chodorov and the Mises seminar, through his path to Anarcho-Capitalism, to the alliance with the New Left of the 1960s. The work was published in 2007; the manuscript dates from the 1970s, supplemented by a chapter from 1991.
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2007
Market or Command. 55 Polemics for Freedom
Original title·Markt oder Befehl. 55 Streitschriften für die Freiheit
Vivisection of Do-Goodery. Part I: Why It Is Not Good to Improve the World by Means of Politics, in: Schweizer Monatshefte
Original title·Vivisektion des Gutmenschentums. Teil I: Warum es nicht gut ist, die Welt mit den Mitteln der Politik zu verbessern, in: Schweizer Monatshefte
Vivisection of Do-Goodery. Part II: Why It Is Not Good to Take from the Rich and Give to the Poor, in: Schweizer Monatshefte
Original title·Vivisektion des Gutmenschentums. Teil II: Warum es nicht gut ist, den Reichen zu nehmen und den Armen zu geben, in: Schweizer Monatshefte
Vivisection of Do-Goodism. Part IV: Why It Is Not Good to Practice Politics by Means of Morality, in: Schweizer Monatshefte
Original title·Vivisektion des Gutmenschentums. Teil IV: Warum es nicht gut ist, Politik mit Mitteln der Moral zu praktizieren, in: Schweizer Monatshefte
A synthesis of eight to ten lectures that Ludwig von Mises delivered at FEE seminars in Irvington in the 1960s; Bettina Bien Greaves recorded them in shorthand, transcribed them, and in 2010 compiled them into a coherent text in twenty chapters. Mises develops money as a pure market phenomenon: it arises from indirect exchange and not from state decree, and the state's role is limited to safeguarding the content of contracts. He justifies the Gold Standard not on aesthetic grounds but on the grounds that the quantity of gold lies beyond the reach of manipulation by governments. He defines inflation as an increase in the money supply, not as the price rises that follow from it, and shows how it devalues the savings of the middle and working classes in particular. Historical cases range from the debasement of Roman coinage under Diocletian, through the German hyperinflation of 1923, to Bretton Woods and the Special Drawing Rights of the IMF. Greaves's editorial footnotes place persons, dates, and events in context.
Strictly Confidential gathers more than forty previously unpublished memoranda, book reviews and letters that Murray N. Rothbard wrote for the William Volker Fund between roughly 1956 and 1962. The collection opens with the confidential strategy paper "What Is to Be Done?", in which Rothbard asks how a libertarian society can be created and calls for a deliberately militant tactic, modelled on Lenin, of building a libertarian "hard core" against dilution by conservatism. The remaining pieces are arranged under political theory, history, economics, foreign policy and literature. Recurring themes are the demarcation of libertarianism from anarchism and from National Review conservatism, a revisionist, non-interventionist foreign policy, and the critique of Keynes, of Irving Fisher's equation of exchange and of the Chicago School.
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2010
Money-Socialism. The real cause of the new global depression (englische Übersetzung von Geldsozialismus)
Original title·Geldsozialismus. Die wirklichen Ursachen der neuen globalen Depression
The Shoemaker, the Farmer and the Prince. What Actually Is Money? A Short Introduction in the Form of a Story, in: Schweizer Monatshefte
Original title·Der Schuster, der Bauer und der Fürst, Was eigentlich ist Geld? Eine kleine Einführung in Form einer Geschichte, in: Schweizer Monatshefte
Hostage-Taking Instead of Liability for Debt. Regulatory Policy: The Taxpayer's Liability for Bankrupt Financial Conglomerates and States Suspends a Crucial Basic Principle of the Market Economy, in: Junge Freiheit
Original title·Geiselhaft statt Schuldhaftung. Ordnungspolitik: Die Haftung des Steuerzahlers für konkursreife Finanzkonzerne und Staaten setzt ein entscheidendes Grundprinzip der Marktwirtschaft außer Kraft, in: Junge Freiheit
This collection gathers fifty-one essays by Murray N. Rothbard, arranged in seven thematic sections: economic method, the Austrian School, property and the public sector, taxation, trade and freedom, money and calculation, and criticism of rival economists. The methodological core defends praxeology, the deductive derivation of economic law from the axiom of purposive human action, against positivism, mathematical modelling, and the empirical testing borrowed from physics. Rothbard applies this framework to welfare economics, property rights and pollution liability, the incidence and alleged neutrality of taxation, mercantilism, the Austrian theory of money, and the socialist calculation debate. The closing section critiques Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Robert Heilbroner, and the Buchanan-Tullock public-choice approach. The essays serve as a companion to Rothbard’s treatise Man, Economy, and State, and the book closes with a bibliography and an index.
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2011
The Interpretive Dimension of Economics: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxeology
"The Great Fiction" brings together 31 essays, lectures, and interviews by Hans-Hermann Hoppe spanning roughly a quarter of a century. The unifying theme is the opposition between private property, defined as exclusive control over scarce means, and the state, defined as the territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making with the power to tax. Hoppe derives private property and original appropriation from Argumentation Ethics and develops from this a defence of the stateless society ordered by private law. The five parts treat social evolution from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution, money and central banking, the private production of defence, the methodological foundations of the Austrian School (Apriorism, probability, Praxeology), and the intellectual history surrounding Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek. Several contributions address democracy, centralization, secession, and migration.
Twenty-nine essays, lectures and memoranda by Mises on monetary, financial and trade policy from the years before, during and after the First World War. The contributions, organized into four parts, address the introduction of the Gold Standard in Austria-Hungary, the foreign-exchange policy of the Austro-Hungarian Bank, the financing of the war through taxes, bonds or inflation, the emigration question, the stabilization of the Austrian currency after 1918, and Mises's critique of Interventionism. Most of the pieces stem from Mises's "lost papers", which were found in 1996 in a Moscow archive, and appear here in English for the first time.
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2012
Sparks of Freedom II. New Aphoristic Inoculations
Original title·Freiheitsfunken II. Neue Aphoristische Impfungen
Hans-Hermann Hoppe's essay offers a theoretical rather than empirical reconstruction of the origin of the state: from the aristocratic state of nature through monarchy to democracy. The starting point is the problem of scarcity, which gives rise to interpersonal conflict; rational people, Hoppe argues, agree on property in the first undisturbed possession and turn for the settlement of disputes to a natural aristocracy of voluntarily recognized judges. The decisive break is the establishment of a territorial monopoly of final decision-making: through an alliance with the people and the intellectuals, the feudal king becomes an absolute and then a constitutional monarch, and finally gives way to democracy. Hoppe interprets this development, usually regarded as progress, as advancing moral and economic folly, since the democratic administrator, unlike the owner-king, exploits in the short term. He points to his work Democracy: The God That Failed and closes with the hope for decentralization and secession.
In three essays Hans-Hermann Hoppe sets out to explain three turning points in human history from what he calls an Austro-Libertarian vantage point, combining Mises's praxeology with Rothbard's natural-law libertarianism. The first essay derives the joint origin of private land ownership and the family from the Neolithic Revolution, presenting both as rational solutions to the Malthusian pressure faced by hunter-gatherers. The second argues that the escape from the Malthusian trap around 1800, the Industrial Revolution, required not merely secure property rights but a long, selective rise in human intelligence and low time preference. The third reconstructs the State as a cumulative error, tracing its descent from a natural aristocratic order through absolute and constitutional monarchy to democracy, which Hoppe reads as decline rather than progress. Throughout, history is treated as contingent yet constrained by praxeological and ethical law.
In this monograph, written in 1959, Murray N. Rothbard examines whether scientific progress requires state planning, and answers in the negative. His central thesis: the allocation of resources to research and technology is an economic problem that the free market, through the price system, solves more efficiently than state direction. Against the backdrop of the Sputnik shock, he refutes the alleged shortage of scientists, the supposed scarcity of private research, and the myth that great inventions require large-scale, state-directed research. In doing so, he draws heavily on Jewkes, Sawers, and Stillerman, as well as on John R. Baker regarding Soviet science. Separate chapters address the inefficiency of state-run military research, atomic energy, specific recommendations on tax policy, and automation, whose consequences for employment he defends against the spectre of technological unemployment. An epilogue recognizes the value of technology for a free life.
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2015
Austrian Subjectivism and the Emergence of Entrepreneurship Theory
This short collection assembles two pieces by Murray N. Rothbard. The longer one, "A Genuine Gold Dollar," argues that the only way to separate money from the state is to redefine the dollar itself as a fixed weight of gold, redeemable on demand by its issuer. Rothbard rejects Hayek's plan to denationalize money through competing private currency names, holding that new names cannot be accepted as money because, by the regression theorem, a medium of exchange must emerge from a prior commodity. He likewise rejects the commodity-basket or "commodity dollar" of Irving Fisher and others, invoking the absence of any unitary price level and the workings of Gresham's law. The second piece, "Alan Greenspan: A Minority Report" (1987), is a polemical portrait casting Greenspan as a conservative Keynesian whose professed Randianism and gold-standard sympathies never reach his actual policy.
Getting Libertarianism Right brings together four texts by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, mostly addresses given to the Property and Freedom Society he founded. Hoppe derives libertarian doctrine from the scarcity of means and self-ownership: conflicts over scarce goods can be avoided only if every resource is assigned unambiguously to private property through original appropriation and voluntary exchange. Building on this, he takes a position in favour of a 'realistic' or right-wing variant of libertarianism that acknowledges empirical differences between people and cultures, and sharply distinguishes himself from left-libertarians. Further contributions address democracy as an accelerator of 'de-civilization', the relationship between libertarianism and the alt-right together with a populist strategy for social change, as well as a personal tribute to Murray Rothbard. The volume closes with an alphabetical index.
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2018
Competition, Economic Planning, and the Knowledge Problem
In ten lectures, Hans-Hermann Hoppe reconstructs world history from the ground up, from the origin of man to the present, as an interdisciplinary synthesis of economics, anthropology, sociology, and history. The starting point is three capacities proper to man: language, property, and production. From there, Hoppe develops the spread of humankind, the deepening of the division of labour, the role of money, time preference, and capital formation, as well as ideological and religious influences on the wealth of nations. The second part deals with the production of law and order without a state (natural order), the parasitic origin of the state, the transition from monarchy to democracy, and war and imperialism. The closing lecture sets out a strategy of secession, privatization, and political decentralization. The work reproduces the lectures given in Auburn in 2004.
OriginalEnglish
2021
Economic Science and the Austrian Method
Original title·Ökonomik als Wissenschaft und die Methode der Österreichischen Schule
