Murray N. Rothbard, Austrian Views (1981)

Murray N. Rothbard’s review of Ludwig von Mises’ Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow (1979) combines intellectual history, an appreciative account of Mises’ defense of capitalism, and a pointed criticism of his political analysis. The book, edited by Margit von Mises from six lectures delivered in Buenos Aires in 1958, supplies an accessible introduction to Austrian economics. Rothbard’s central judgment is that Mises compellingly explains market freedom but leaves insufficiently examined the institutional incentives sustaining intervention.

The review begins by placing Mises’ career against twentieth-century statism and mechanistic social science. Rothbard presents the displacement of Austrian business-cycle theory by Keynesianism as a victory of intellectual fashion and political compatibility rather than refutation. He connects the subsequent Austrian revival to the 1974 conference in Vermont, Hayek’s Nobel Prize, and the challenge that stagflation posed to Keynesian explanations. Against this background, the lectures address a continuing need for an introduction that preserves Mises’ clarity and illustrative teaching style.

Rothbard devotes much of his exposition to Mises’ account of industrialization. Its decisive achievement was not merely an improvement in statistical measures of welfare but the creation of employment and mass consumption for people previously excluded by feudal privilege, guild restrictions, and subsistence conditions.

For the first time in history capitalism had brought jobs and prosperity, as well as a world of mass production for the mass of consumers.

This argument reverses the familiar moral indictment of factories: Rothbard endorses Mises’ interpretation of aristocratic opposition and factory regulation as attempts to restrain competing employment opportunities. The conceptual distinction is between state-created caste and market income. The former fixes privilege or disadvantage politically; the latter remains contingent on an ability to serve consumers. Unequal market outcomes therefore do not, in this account, constitute an enduring caste order.

Consumer sovereignty also organizes the discussion of socialism. Planning transfers authority from consumers and individuals to a governing board, joining economic control to surveillance of personal and cultural life.

If the government does the "planning," this means that individuals cannot plan for themselves.

Rothbard emphasizes the reach of this claim: artistic innovation, personal error, and ordinary choices cannot be insulated from comprehensive economic direction. Mises’ argument against paternalism likewise exposes the difficulty of permitting coercion over drinking or smoking while denying its legitimacy over books, films, and music.

The review turns critical when Mises laments politicians’ service to pressure groups. Rothbard asks why entering politics should transform ordinary self-interest into disinterested concern for national welfare. He then uses Mises’ example of sugar protection to explain the asymmetry between concentrated producers and dispersed consumers. Producers have a continuous stake in securing privileges, while any single protected commodity commands little of a consumer’s attention.

The necessarily eager minority will win out over the necessarily passive majority.

This is more than a complaint about misguided politicians. Rothbard treats intervention as an outcome encouraged by political organization itself, making the review’s closing argument a corrective to an exclusively educational strategy for liberal reform.

The problem is not only ideas but also political institutions that are stacked against freedom.

Rothbard concludes that rational economic arguments must be complemented by a moral theory capable of arousing opposition to the injustice of special privilege. The review’s distinctive contribution lies in this movement from defending Mises’ economics to identifying what that defense still requires: an account of political incentives and a motivating conception of justice.