Who was Ludwig von Mises?
Born in 1881 in Lemberg, then in Austria-Hungary and now Lviv in Ukraine, Ludwig von Mises took his degree in law and government at Vienna. He spent some 25 years as an adviser at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. In his spare time he ran a private seminar that drew young economists, Friedrich Hayek among them. In 1934 he moved to Geneva and in 1940 to New York. He became a US citizen in 1946 and taught at New York University for over two decades. Among his books are The Theory of Money and Credit, Socialism, Liberalism and his large treatise Human Action. He died in New York in 1973.
Political views
- Claimed that socialism cannot calculate rationally, since without market prices there is no way to compare the uses of capital goods.Source: mises.org
- Believed state meddling in markets brings results its backers did not want, which left laissez-faire capitalism as the only workable system.Source: mises.org
- Treated private property as the foundation of liberty and peace, and described classical liberalism as a programme built on it.Source: mises.org
- Developed a business cycle theory in which banks expand credit, investment is distorted and a boom turns into a bust.Source: mises.org
- Backed decentralised government and the right of peoples to decide their own status. The Mises Institute presents this as his way to peace.Source: mises.org
- Concluded that only unrestricted laissez-faire policy works, and spoke out against tariffs and limits on immigration.Source: mises.org
Legacy
Mises helped shape the Austrian school and, later, the libertarian movement. Hayek, Murray Rothbard and others learned from him, and an institute in his name opened in 1982. Supporters say the failures of planned economies proved his calculation argument right. Many mainstream economists reject praxeology, his claim that economics is a deductive science that data cannot test. They add that his objection to nearly every kind of intervention overlooks market failures and the performance of mixed economies.
In their own words
“The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property”