Ludwig von Mises, Ein Wort zum Monopolpreisproblem

Ludwig von Mises’s 1965 essay examines monopoly pricing as a limited exception to consumer sovereignty and as a justification for government intervention. Originally published in Vom Sinn der Konzentration, it moves from a conceptual distinction between monopoly and monopoly price to a polemical account of antimonopoly ideology, then to the mechanisms by which governments sustain cartels. Its central contention is that policies presented as defenses of competition frequently create the monopoly prices they condemn.

Mises begins with the market’s discipline over owners of productive resources: satisfying consumers’ most urgent wants brings returns, while failing to do so brings losses and ultimately loss of ownership. Against this account of consumer sovereignty, he introduces a carefully delimited exception:

Nicht jeder Preis, zu dem ein Monopolgut verkauft wird, ist ein Monopolpreis.

English translation: Not every price at which a monopoly good is sold is a monopoly price.

Exclusive ownership alone does not establish the power to charge a monopoly price. A copyright holder, for example, may find no buyers at all. The decisive condition is a configuration of demand that makes restricting output more profitable than expanding it to the competitive level. Monopoly pricing thus denotes a particular departure from production governed by consumers’ priorities, not simply the existence of a sole seller.

Die Souveränität der Verbraucher ist mithin nicht vollkommen.

English translation: The sovereignty of the consumers is accordingly not complete.

This concession matters to the argument: Mises does not make government intervention a necessary condition of every monopoly price. He allows that a worldwide cartel of diamond-deposit owners could arise and operate for a time without state assistance. Such cases, he maintains, are rare; their possibility does not establish a general tendency for free competition to destroy itself.

The section “Die Fabel von der Verelendung” shifts from price theory to ideological history. Mises argues that monopoly doctrine replaced the Marxist prediction of growing mass impoverishment once that prediction became untenable. He presents Soviet advocacy of full socialization and American reliance on antitrust prosecution as different remedies founded on a shared diagnosis of monopoly danger. His own position reverses that diagnosis:

Die Regierungen des noch nicht kommunistischen Sektors der Weltwirtschaft bestreben sich, Monopolpreisbildung zu ermöglichen.

English translation: The governments of the not-yet-communist sector of the world economy endeavor to make the formation of monopoly prices possible.

Patent and copyright laws supply one example, though a footnote explicitly leaves their merits undecided. Mises’s purpose here is to identify the legal intervention enabling these monopoly prices, not to settle whether intellectual-property protection is desirable.

The final section, “Kartelle nur im Schutze der Obrigkeit,” explains the institutional and organizational obstacles to cartel formation. Import restrictions insulate domestic producers from world competition, but insulation alone cannot secure agreement over reduced sales:

Das Problem der Bildung und des Funktionierens eines Kartellvertrages ist die Quotenfrage.

English translation: The problem of the formation and the functioning of a cartel agreement is the question of quotas.

Because a monopoly price requires restricting aggregate sales, cartel members must agree on their individual shares. Mises treats this allocation problem as a major barrier to voluntary coordination. American agricultural policy illustrates government undertaking the task that producers cannot accomplish themselves, using expenditure and administrative controls to impose monopoly prices. The international coffee agreement extends the argument beyond domestic protection, with Soviet participation reinforcing his claim that ostensibly opposed political systems cooperate in restricting competition.

Mises contrasts these arrangements with antitrust authorities’ efforts to prevent mergers into larger, more economical enterprises and their increasing assumption of price-control functions amid inflation. He concludes that a consistent policy against monopoly pricing must abandon the distinction between politically favored and disfavored monopolies and remove barriers that shield producers from imports. The essay’s conceptual force lies in separating monopoly ownership, profitable output restriction, and state-supported cartelization. Its political critique rests on the tension between governments’ condemnation of private monopoly and their deliberate creation of protected markets.