Ludwig von Mises, Trends Can Change

Ludwig von Mises’s Trends Can Change is a polemical essay first published in The Freeman on February 12, 1951, and collected in the supplied 1952 version. Its subject is the intellectual authority claimed for prevailing political tendencies, especially the expansion of government control over economic life. Mises challenges two propositions commonly joined under the name of progress: that recent historical trends must continue, and that whatever succeeds earlier arrangements must be better. His central contention is that neither proposition warrants abandoning economic judgment or political opposition.

The essay opens by reconstructing the philosophy behind this surrender to historical necessity. The extrapolation of recent developments into an inevitable future combines, in Mises’s account, with a Hegelian conception of history as progressive improvement. Together they turn disagreement over policy into resistance against both destiny and moral advancement. Consequently, the merits of particular measures cease to determine their legitimacy:

The only legitimate source for the cognition of what is salutary and has to be accomplished today is the knowledge of what was accomplished yesterday.

This sentence states the rule Mises attributes to his opponents, not his own method. Its circularity supplies the target of the essay: past policy supposedly determines future necessity, while future necessity certifies present policy as beneficial. Measures can then be defended as expressions of their age without examining what they actually accomplish.

Mises applies this criticism to increasing taxation, administrative restrictions, and the displacement of private economic decisions by government control. He describes entrepreneurship as activity directed toward consumers’ wishes through the market, so that transferring authority away from entrepreneurs is not, in his account, simply transferring power from a privileged minority to “the people.” The progressive narrative obscures this distinction by presenting the welfare state as humanity’s appointed destination. Its influence extends beyond committed socialists: opponents who fear comprehensive planning nevertheless become politically ineffective when they accept its inevitability. Historical fatalism thus helps produce the outcome it claims merely to predict.

The middle of the essay distinguishes this newer justification of socialism from Marx’s prediction of increasing proletarian impoverishment. Mises argues that rising popular living standards and mass consumption under capitalism have contradicted the claim that technological gains accrue exclusively to capitalists. He treats the doctrine of irreversible trends as a substitute for that discredited forecast: socialism is now pronounced inevitable because intervention has recently expanded, rather than because workers necessarily become poorer. The argumentative basis changes, while the asserted destination remains the same.

Against this replacement doctrine, Mises questions the inference from observed direction to necessary continuation:

Historical trends do not necessarily go on for ever.

He first appeals to ordinary economic caution. Rising prices do not assure businessmen that prices will rise indefinitely; they may instead increase concern about a reversal. Statistics describe past events, and extending their lines into the future does not establish an inexorable historical law. His examples then broaden beyond numerical prediction. Increasing interregional exchange in the Roman world gave way to the relative self-sufficiency of medieval manors. Likewise, eighteenth-century expectations that European warfare was becoming more restrained did not establish a permanent movement toward humane conflict. These examples demonstrate the possibility of reversal rather than identify a universal cycle or timetable.

Mises then separates the question of historical direction from that of social value. Even granting the inevitability of socialism for argument’s sake would not establish its superiority:

It is not true that human conditions must always improve, and that a relapse into very unsatisfactory modes of life, penury and barbarism is impossible.

This is the essay’s second decisive conceptual move. Prediction cannot replace evaluation, and chronology cannot establish improvement. Mises attributes contemporary mass prosperity to laissez-faire capitalism and denies that either theory or historical experience guarantees its preservation under socialism. His references to increasing divorce and suicide make the narrower logical point that an upward trend does not, merely by continuing, become evidence of desirable change.

The closing sections explain how fatalism becomes common sense through education, newspapers, and political competition. Mises portrays graduates retaining belief in inevitable planning even after forgetting much of their formal learning. Opposition politicians reinforce it when they criticize individual policies but hesitate to challenge the direction labeled progressive. Admiration for socialist leaders, coupled with explanations that blame Soviet failures on particular rulers or circumstances, illustrates how the ideal can remain insulated from criticism. Economic inquiry itself loses authority: agreement with the presumed course of history makes it redundant, while disagreement makes it suspect.

The conclusion answers resignation with agency:

But they changed only because they met firm opposition.

The antecedent is historical trends. Mises’s point is therefore not that intervention will automatically collapse or that capitalism is destined to return. Reversal requires people willing to contest the ideas sustaining the prevailing direction. The essay’s enduring relevance lies in this connection between historical explanation and political conduct: belief in inevitability can disable the opposition through which change becomes possible. Its defense of economic freedom consequently begins with reopening questions that the language of destiny has declared settled.