In Human Action, Mises starts from the ideas set forth in his Theory and History that all actions and decisions are based on human needs, wants, and desires and continues deeper and further to explain how studying this human action is not only a legitimate science (praxeology) but how that science is based on the foundation of free-market economics.
Mises presents and discusses all existing economic theories and then proceeds to explain how the only sensible, realistic, and feasible theory of economics is one based on how the needs and desires of human beings dictate trends, affect profits and losses, adjust supply and demand, set prices, and otherwise maintain, regulate, and control economic forces.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
More than thirty years ago F. A. Hayek said of Socialism: It was a work on political economy in the tradition of the great moral philosophers, a Montesquieu or Adam Smith, containing both acute knowledge and profound wisdom. . . . To none of us young men who read the book when it appeared was the world ever the same again. This is a newly annotated edition of the classic first published in German in 1922. It is the definitive refutation of nearly every type of socialism ever devised. Mises presents a wide-ranging analysis of society, comparing the results of socialist planning with those of free-market capitalism in all areas of life.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Published in 1944, during World War II, Omnipotent Government was Mises's first book written and published after he arrived in the United States. In this volume Mises provides in economic terms an explanation of the international conflicts that caused both world wars. Although written more than half a century ago, Mises's main theme still stands: government interference in the economy leads to conflicts and wars. According to Mises, the last and best hope for peace is liberalism--the philosophy of liberty, free markets, limited government, and democracy.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
This book presents the theoretical and practical arguments for liberalism in the classical tradition as defined by Mises as the liberal doctrine of the harmony of the rightly understood interests of all members of a free society founded on the principle of private ownership of the means of production. The foundation of liberalism, Mises says, rests on an understanding and appreciation of private property, social cooperation, the freedom idea, ethics and morality, democracy, and the legitimate role of government. Also in this book, Mises contrasts liberalism with other conceivable systems of social organization such as socialism, communism, and fascism.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
In this anthology, Mises offers an articulate and accessible introduction to and critique of two topics he considers especially important: inflation and government interventionism. Mises believes inflation, that is monetary expansion, is destructive; it destroys savings and investment, which are the basis for production and prosperity. Government controls and economic planning never accomplish what their proponents intend. Mises consistently argues that the solution to government intervention is free markets and free enterprise, which call for reforming government. For that, ideas must be changed to let the market system work. There is no better planning for freedom than this.
The seventeen essays in Planning for Freedom: Let the Market System Work are tied together by one overarching idea, best expressed by Mises in the capstone essay Profit and Loss. The essays in the final section of the book summarize Mises's contributions to economic thought and emphasize his firm belief in the power of ideas.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Bureaucracy contrasts the two forms of economic management--that of a free-market economy and that of a bureaucracy. In the market economy entrepreneurs are driven to serve consumers by their desire to earn profits and to avoid losses. In a bureaucracy, the managers must comply with orders issued by the legislative body under which they operate; they may not spend without authorization, and they may not deviate from the path prescribed by law.
Ludwig von Mises here lucidly demonstrates how the efficiencies of private ownership and control of public good production ultimately trump the guesswork of publicly administered planning through codes and officialdom.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
Economic Policy contains six lectures Ludwig von Mises delivered in 1959 for the Centro de Estudios sobre la Libertad in Argentina. The lectures were posthumously edited by Mises's wife, Margit, and George Koether, a student and long-time friend of Mises. This volume serves as an excellent introduction to what Mises sees as the simple truths of history in terms of economic principles. In straightforward language, Mises explains topics such as capitalism, socialism, interventionism, inflation, foreign investment, and economic policies and ideas.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
Essential to Mises's concept of a classical liberal economy is the absence of interference by the state. In World War I, Germany and its allies were overpowered by the Allied Powers in population, economic production, and military might, and its defeat was inevitable.
Mises believed that Germany should not seek revenge for the peace of Versailles; rather it should adopt liberal ideas and a free-market economy by expanding the international division of labor, which would help all parties. For us and for humanity, Mises wrote, there is only one salvation: return to rationalistic liberalism.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
The three treatises in On the Manipulation of Money and Credit were written in German between 1923 and 1931. Together they include some of Mises's most important contributions to monetary and trade-cycle theories and constitute a precursor to Mises's major work, Human Action.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
Published for the first time together in one volume is Ludwig von Mises's Notes and Recollections with The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics.
Written between 1940 and 1941, shortly after he arrived in the United States, Notes and Recollections is in effect Mises's pre-1940 intellectual autobiography. This work reveals how Mises developed his theories, wrote his books, lectured, and taught; it describes his life in Vienna and the people with whom he worked. He also discusses his activities as an adviser to Austrian government officials and his frustrations in attempting to keep inflation and communist and Nazi ideas from destroying the Austrian economy.
The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics is an essay originally published in English in 1969 that reveals Mises's intellectual development in the context of the origins of the Austrian School. It serves as a good introduction to the theory and history of the Austrian School.
As Mises explains in these two works, his viewpoint that modern economics is based on subjective value and marginal-utility theory separated him from classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill.
Theory and History is primarily a critique of Karl Marx, his materialism, and his prediction of the inevitability of socialism. Marx attributes the creation of tools and machines, as well as the economic structure of society, to undefined material productive forces. Mises rejects this materialistic view; he points out that tools and machines are actually created by individuals acting on the basis of non-materialistic ideas.
This book discusses the theory of economics, i.e., the study of purposive human action, and history, the record of the past actions of individuals.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
First published in German in 1933 and in English in 1960, Epistemological Problems of Economics presents Ludwig von Mises's views on the logical and epistemological features of social interpretation as well as his argument that the Austrian theory of value is the core element of a general theory of human behavior that transcends traditional limitations of economic science.
This volume is unique among Mises's works in that it contains a collection of essays in which he contested the theories of intellectuals he respected such as Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and Max Weber. Mises describes how value theory applies to human action at all times and places as opposed to economic theory, which applies only to a human action guided by economic calculation.
In a review of Epistemological Problems of Economics that was published in Teacher's College Record in 1965, F. A. Hayek stated, If Professor Mises's Human Action . . . must be regarded as the definitive statement of his views, the distinctive features of his notions of the nature of social science have found their freshest expression in the present series of essays, dating from 1928 to 1933.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
Published for the first time together in one volume is Ludwig von Mises's Notes and Recollections with The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics.
Written between 1940 and 1941, shortly after he arrived in the United States, Notes and Recollections is in effect Mises's pre-1940 intellectual autobiography. This work reveals how Mises developed his theories, wrote his books, lectured, and taught; it describes his life in Vienna and the people with whom he worked. He also discusses his activities as an adviser to Austrian government officials and his frustrations in attempting to keep inflation and communist and Nazi ideas from destroying the Austrian economy.
The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics is an essay originally published in English in 1969 that reveals Mises's intellectual development in the context of the origins of the Austrian School. It serves as a good introduction to the theory and history of the Austrian School.
As Mises explains in these two works, his viewpoint that modern economics is based on subjective value and marginal-utility theory separated him from classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill.
Economic Freedom and Interventionism is both a primer of the fundamental thought of Ludwig von Mises and an anthology of the writings of perhaps the best-known exponent of what is now known as the Austrian School of economics. This volume contains forty-seven articles edited by Mises scholar Bettina Bien Greaves. Among them are Mises's expositions of the role of government, his discussion of inequality of wealth, inflation, socialism, welfare, and economic education, as well as his exploration of the deeper significance of economics as it affects seemingly noneconomic relations between human beings. These papers are valuable reading for students of economic freedom and the science of human action.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
Mises turned his attention to one of the great puzzles of all time: discovering why the intellectuals hate capitalism. Theresult is this socio-psycho-cultural analysis informed by economic theory. Mises explores answers from a wide variety of angles, and discusses the nature of academic institutions, popular culture, and how vices like jealousy and envy affect theory. All play a role in preventing people from seeing the self-evident benefits of economic freedom relative to controls. His comments on the resentment of the intellectuals cut very deeply. Mises shrewdly teases the anti-capitalist bias out of contemporary fiction and popular culture generally. In the course of his narrative, he explains aspects of the market that have generally eluded even its defenders.
After Ludwig von Mises's death in 1973, his wife, Margit von Mises, went through his unpublished and out-of-print essays and selected twenty-one of the essays for publication. The result was Money, Method, and the Market Process, published in 1990 by Kluwer Academic Publishers and the Ludwig von Mises Institute and reissued now by Liberty Fund.
In his introduction to the book, Richard Ebeling describes it as a convenient composite of 'Misesian economics.' He says that the essays here touch on almost every aspect of economic and social theory that Mises considered of paramount importance.
The essays were written from the 1930s to the 1960s, so they serve as a wide sampling of Mises's thought on a range of subjects, and they are arranged thematically.
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.
Please note that Liberty Fund is licensed by Springer Science + Business Media to sell this title in the USA only.
The Free Market and Its Enemies is a classic work of economic theory, written by one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Ludwig von Mises argues that the free market is the only system that can effectively allocate resources and create prosperity, and he exposes the fallacies of socialism and other rival economic systems.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.