Mises’s article is a brief but pointed intervention in debates over economic education. He reviews a 1961 task-force report on high-school economics sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development and the American Economic Association, accepting its premise that instruction is inadequate while rejecting its proposed remedy.
It is admitted by everybody that the understanding of the American economy developed in most high schools today is not adequate for effective citizenship.
For Mises, the issue is not whether students should learn economics, but what counts as economics. He argues that the report disguises interventionist and pro-socialist assumptions as neutral civic pedagogy, thereby turning curriculum reform into ideological formation.
It provides virtually a résumé of the ideas held by "progressives"—men who have been most influential in this country's movement away from the free market economy.
The core of his criticism is the report’s comparative-systems approach. It treats capitalism, communism, and other arrangements as alternative “systems” whose advantages and disadvantages can be impartially listed. Mises regards this symmetry as false because it obscures the decisive institutional difference between market coordination through prices and production directed by coercive authority.
As the report sees it, there are various economic systems—“capitalist, communist, or any other”—and the task of economics is to describe and to compare the good and the bad aspects of each of them.
Much of the essay proceeds through close attention to the report’s wording. Mises objects to softening qualifiers that, in his view, conceal the nature of communist planning. When the report says only “major” decisions are made by Soviet leaders, he treats the phrase as an evasion rather than a clarification.
Could any of the authors tell us what the "minor" decisions are, as distinguished from the "major" ones, and who the people are to whom these minor decisions are entrusted?
The article then broadens from terminology to economic doctrine. Mises rejects the suggestion that central planning avoids market instability, invoking his Austrian view that depression results from state-created credit expansion rather than from laissez-faire capitalism itself. He also argues that official statistics from dictatorships cannot be weighed as though they came from open societies with free criticism, independent journalism, and public scrutiny.
A further target is the report’s treatment of government and business “power.” Mises denies that the market case depends on privatizing the police, courts, or national defense; those are protective functions of government, not ordinary production for consumers. Likewise, he insists that large firms do not possess coercive power merely because customers voluntarily buy from them. Their market position, as he presents it, reflects success in serving consumers under competition.
The concluding section interprets the report as a symptom of American middle-of-the-road interventionism: formally democratic, rhetorically balanced, but steadily hostile to the free market. Mises predicts that students may either absorb the bias passively or begin asking questions the curriculum cannot answer—about subsidies, coercion, censorship, travel restrictions, and the absence of genuine consumer sovereignty under communism. The essay’s final importance lies in its warning that economic education becomes indoctrination when comparison omits property, prices, incentives, and freedom of criticism.
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