Ludwig von Mises

The most prominent scholar of the Austrian School of Economics, was inspired to become an economist in his early twenties while a student at the University of Vienna .  It was 1903.  While the intellectual world was enthralled with Socialism, von Mises quickly understood its shortcomings and challenged its economic credibility.  

Born on September 29, 1881, in Lemberg, in what is now known as Lviv in the Ukraine .  In 1906 he earned a degree as doctor of laws and social sciences, and in 1912, published his first book, The Theory of Money and Credit. In a paper published in 1920, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonweath”, he identified inherit weaknesses in the socialist system where markets are not allowed to freely function and the consequential distortions that limit its functionality. His writings were widely read, but caused him to be denied a teaching position in the government owned European Universities.  He was granted permission to teach, without pay.  

F.A. Hayek credits Mises book, Socialism, as re-directing the thinking of many European intellectuals, himself included, in pursuing socialism as an solution for a more rational and just world.  A group of about twenty five young intellectuals would meet every other week in Mises’ office, free, to learn from him in informal discussions on economics and philosophy.  

He understood the shortcomings of inflating the money supply, and witnessed the hyper-inflation that took place in Germany during the 1920’s that reached 300 percent per month and wiped out millions of people.  He was instrumental in advising the Austrian government to stop printing money as inflation reached 50 percent per month in his homeland.  He was one of the first to recognize that Socialism, Fascism, Communism and Nazism were all variations of government controlled economies dependant on denying freedom of choice, private property, and free market activity.  He predicted the economic limitations these systems would encounter.  

Born a Jew, and being a proponent of free markets and an outspoken  adversary of government intervention, it became unsafe to live in Europe and he and his wife, moved to New York in August, 1940.   

His contemporaries included Ayn Rand, Henry Hazlitt, Leonard Read, and other champions of freedom.  He regularly lectured at the Foundation of Economic Education.  He authored many books on Economics, the most famous of which is Human Action.  Austrian economist Murray N. Rothbard hailed it as “the economic Bible for the civilized man”.¹  

Ludwig von Mises, was an active advocate for human freedom, his entire life, which ended on October 10, 1973.  He was ninety-two.  

Mises was dramatically vindicated by the 1991 collapse of the Soviet empire. In The New Yorker, influential socialist author Robert L. Heilbroner recalled that Mises had long maintgained “that no Central Planning Board could ever gather the enormous amount of information needed to create a workable economic system.”  Heilbroner confessed: “Mises was right.”²

Long after Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes are forgotten, Ludwig von Mises will be known as a man who told the truth about government power which blighted the twentieth century.  He showed with blazing clarity that free markets relieve misery, liberate the human spirit, and make it possible for people everywhere to breathe free.³

Gerald Frendt, September, 2008.

For more information:  

     ¹ Jim Powell,  The Triumph of Liberty (New York: The Fee Press, A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc., 2000)  358.  

     ²  Powell, 360  

     ³ Powell, 360