The archive.

Wealth springs from nature and human labor alone, the popular doctrine holds, so that profit, interest, and rent are parasitic deductions from what workers produce. Against this exploitation thesis, shared by revolutionary socialists and mild reformists alike, Mises reconstructs production as the coordination of three factors, natural resources, labor, and capital goods, directed by reason and entrepreneurial judgment. Capital goods, he insists, come into being only through saving, the withholding of goods from immediate consumption to sustain longer and more productive processes, and the capitalist who owns them is disciplined by consumer demand rather than freed from it. From this follows his verdict on wages: union bargaining and minimum-wage decrees cannot lift real pay, which rises only as investment per worker grows. India serves as his cautionary case of capital starved by policy.

There is no other method to make wage rates rise than by investing more capital per worker.

Government is neither evil nor dispensable: peace among people requires an apparatus able to restrain violence, and Western history is largely the effort to confine that apparatus by rights and law. From this limited defense Mises turns to the deception named in his title, the interventionism that claims to preserve private property while subjecting every business decision to official permission whenever rulers invoke the public interest. Such a policy, he argues, is no coherent third system between the market economy of consumer sovereignty and the command economy of political orders; the two assign final authority to different agents and cannot be fused into a workable composite. Each intervention disappoints its own authors and provokes the next, until the market determination of production and consumption is, decree by decree, eliminated.

The subjugation of a free nation by the forces of the most tyrannical regime history has ever known is called "liberation."

Delivered for Henry Hazlitt's seventieth birthday in November 1964, this short tribute expands a birthday homage into a statement of the classical-liberal vocation. Mises honors Hazlitt not as a friend alone but as the writer who, across books, essays, a novel, and a weekly Newsweek column, refused to concede that freedom is an obsolete prejudice—an assumption Mises had lately heard voiced aloud when a listener demanded to know why liberty was worth aiming at. Into the homage he folds his own doctrine: the material lot of the masses can be raised by one method only, the accumulation of capital faster than population grows. Hazlitt is cast as the economic conscience of the nation, heir to Cannan and Bastiat, and the address ends by turning from his generation's defeats to the hope that a rising cohort of liberty's defenders will yet succeed.

But our meeting is not simply a private affair because you do not belong only to us, you belong to the nation and to the world.

Keynesianism as doctrine may be dead, but its slogans still cloud economic understanding—so runs the argument of this 1964 Freeman review of W. H. Hutt's Keynesianism—Retrospect and Prospect. The General Theory succeeded, in Mises's reading, not by advancing theory but by lending scientific respectability to policies governments already wanted: deficit finance, currency devaluation, price intervention, and the coercive privileges of labor unions, the whole machinery of the New Deal. Hutt's value lies in clearing the air, restating the elementary price theory that Keynesian vocabulary had buried. For Mises the decisive charge is that Keynes and his followers simply do not grasp what prices are or how they arise; treating them as administrative quantities to be set by authority replaces voluntary coordination with force and conceals the resulting dislocations beneath a fog of terminology.

The main failure of Keynes and all his disciples and admirers is to be seen in the fact that they simply do not know what prices are, how they originate, and what they bring about.

The so-called right to strike, Mises argues, is nothing of the kind: it is a state-granted license for striking workers to use violence against those who would take their place, a suspension of the equal legal protection every other citizen enjoys. From this legal-political indictment the essay, reprinted from Christian Economics, builds its economic case. Governments accept abroad, in foreign aid, the classical truth they deny at home—that wages rise only as capital accumulates faster than population. Fix wages above the market-clearing rate by decree or union compulsion, and marginal workers are priced out: firms either raise prices and lose sales or absorb losses and close. Since the working masses are themselves the main consumers of what capitalism produces, no coercive wage can lift the class as a whole; only saving and new capital can.

What is today euphemistically called the right to strike is in fact the right of striking workers, by recourse to violence, to prevent people who want to work from working.

A sole seller cannot necessarily profit by restricting supply. That distinction anchors Ludwig von Mises’s short essay on monopoly prices and sharpens its political challenge: governments may sustain the very pricing practices they profess to oppose. Mises acknowledges that monopoly pricing can arise without state assistance, but directs attention to import barriers and the difficulty cartel members face in agreeing on sales quotas. Agricultural controls and the international coffee agreement illustrate his contention that public authority often supplies what voluntary coordination cannot. The essay offers a compact way to distinguish exclusive ownership from profitable output restriction—and to test antimonopoly policy against the protections it grants producers, rather than its declared intentions.

When anticapitalism gave up Marx's prophecy of ever-deepening proletarian misery, it fell back on a newer charge: that free competition inevitably breeds cartels that fleece the masses. Mises answers by prising monopoly apart from monopoly price, since mere exclusivity, whether a patent or a unique resource, yields no profit unless demand permits it, and then locating the real source of durable monopoly pricing in state action, in the tariffs that wall off national markets, the subsidies, and the enforced production quotas. His central exhibit is American farm policy, a public cartel for food and cotton that still founders on the question of quotas, while antitrust law becomes a covert substitute for general price control. The international coffee agreement, he argues, is conspiracy renamed diplomacy once governments assign the shares.

Die angeblich unaufhaltsame Tendenz zur Verdrängung der Wettbewerbspreise des freien Marktes durch Monopolpreise gibt es nicht.

English translation: “The supposedly irresistible tendency for monopoly prices to supplant the competitive prices of the free market does not exist.”

Institutions can keep their legal form intact while their social meaning quietly reverses—and reforms that once made sense become, in Mises's word, atavistic. Written for a 1966 Festschrift honoring Jacques Rueff, the essay pursues the claim through two cases. Egalitarian land redistribution answered a feudal order where property tracked caste, conquest, and privilege; under the market it is incoherent, since consumers decide anew each day who shall own the factors of production and owners hold their land only by serving buyers efficiently. Favoritism toward debtors once meant relieving the poor against wealthy lenders, but capitalism has flipped the class map: ordinary people are the creditors, through savings and pensions, while the rich borrow. Gottfried Feder's Nazi slogan against interest slavery becomes Mises's emblem of the confusion, answered by the gold standard's protection of the common man's savings.

The owners are mandates of the consumers as it were, bound to employ their property as if it were entrusted to them by the people.

Ricardo's observation that insecurity drives capital to flee abroad sets the theme of this 1966 essay, which tracks how the nineteenth century's world trade in capital goods gave way to twentieth-century hostility toward saving itself. Foreign investment, Mises argues, was never conquest but a transfer of capital to lands unable to generate it; recast by socialist and nationalist doctrine as 'imperialism,' its expropriation gets dressed up as 'liberation,' and voluntary investment predictably vanishes. He then turns on union productivity statistics: output per worker reflects the capital equipment behind the worker, not effort alone, so crediting every gain to labor leaves nothing for the savers who financed the tools. Progressive income, corporate, and inheritance taxes complete the confiscation of 'unearned' returns—and the mechanism of accumulation quietly dies.

Saving, capital accumulation and investment will no longer pay and will come to an end.

Exchange crises, draining reserves, balance-of-payments alarms: the international monetary problem, Mises contends, is a domestic policy problem wearing a foreign mask. Governments inflate and cheapen credit at home while pledging fixed exchange parities abroad, then blame tourists, importers, and speculators for the contradiction they created. Reasserting the purchasing-power-parity theory against the balance-of-payments doctrine, he argues that currencies exchange according to what they buy, so a state that expands its money supply must watch its currency's external value fall; what the press calls an attack is only the market correcting an official falsification. He distinguishes inflation, the increase of money beyond demand, from inflationism, its deliberate fiscal use, and dismisses reserve pooling and new international facilities as schemes to spread one country's inflation to others. An appendix shows how anticipated depreciation corrupts interest rates and business accounting alike.

Inflationism is not a variety of economic policies. It is an instrument of destruction; if not stopped very soon, it destroys the market entirely.

Scarcity sets the members of a species at odds, yet human beings escape that antagonism through the division of labor and peaceful exchange, so that the market becomes the standard form of interhuman relations. Against both anarchism and socialism, this 1968 essay argues that the market cannot defend itself and therefore needs the state—'a grim apparatus of coercion'—to restrain those who break the peace. But no middle sphere exists: talk of a friendly 'public sector' cannot fuse the two opposed principles of voluntary agreement and command. Planning does not merely administer production differently; it transfers the individual's power of choice to a central authority, demanding obedience from cradle to coffin. Mises ends categorically—the market economy is the only order tending toward the cheapest provisioning of consumers.

There is no conciliation between constraint and spontaneity.

Interviewed by Percy Greaves in 1969, amid dollar weakness and gold anxiety in the last years of Bretton Woods, Mises reduces the era's monetary troubles to a single fiscal evasion. Inflation, he insists, is not a mysterious rise of prices but a policy of creating money by fiat to spend beyond taxes and honest borrowing; because new money enters through particular hands, it redistributes purchasing power toward first receivers and strips it from savers, pensioners, and endowed institutions. He overturns the folk image of inflation as the poor debtor's friend—ordinary households are now the creditors, through deposits, bonds, and insurance—and rebuts the balance-of-payments alibi that blames importers and tourists. Sound money, he concludes, is inseparable from limited government, and the gold standard's merit is that officials cannot manufacture it to cover their deficits.

The gold standard did not fail. The governments sabotaged it and still go on sabotaging it.