The archive.

Every socialist scheme founders on the same rock, the impossibility of economic calculation, and this sequel to the 1920 essay takes up the objections against that thesis one by one. Mises works through Arthur Wolfgang Cohn's revival of Schäffle's administratively fixed Sozialtaxe, Karl Polányi's guild-socialist functionalism, and Eduard Heimann's cost-based pricing, showing that each must collapse either into central planning, where calculation admittedly fails, or into syndicalism, where associations trade as owners and socialism dissolves. He then turns on the Soviet and Marxist replies of Tschajanow, Strumilin, Varga, and Kautsky, arguing that inherited capitalist prices, labor-time reckoning, and the reduction of heterogeneous labor all break down against scarce natural factors. No socialist, he concludes, has yet produced a workable method of calculation.

Man durfte den Sozialismus preisen, man durfte jedoch über ihn nicht nachdenken.

English translation: “One was permitted to extol socialism, but one was not permitted to think about it.”

For Ludwig von Mises, Germany’s monetary catastrophe was not merely a failure of policy: economic writers had helped prepare it. In this brief 1924 review of Gustav Seibt’s Deutschlands kranke Wirtschaft und ihre Wiederherstellung, he praises an economist whose warnings went unheard and whose monetary analysis supported demands to stop printing money and restore a free economy. The revealing tension is between predictive success and public influence: Mises regards Seibt as vindicated by events, yet sees little prospect that discredited doctrines will lose their following. His defence of a book already overtaken in some particulars by the Ruhr occupation and the Rentenmark shows how he distinguishes dated information from enduring theory—and makes intellectual responsibility central to his judgement of economic writing.

Restoring a depreciated currency to its former metallic parity can look like an act of restitution. In this 1924 essay, Ludwig von Mises asks whether it actually compensates those whom inflation injured. His answer turns on a concrete mismatch: money and claims have changed hands, debts have been repaid, and new contracts reflect depreciated values. Appreciation therefore benefits present creditors, not necessarily past victims, while burdening debtors who may never have gained from inflation. Mises distinguishes the legal promise of redemption from money’s subsequent monetary function, and contractual compensation from a general rise in purchasing power. His treatment of sterling’s international standing tests the competing case for restoring confidence. The essay clarifies why repairing a currency and repairing losses are different policy tasks.

A movement can declare war on Marxism while remaining as anticapitalist as the doctrine it fights: this is the paradox Mises anatomizes in republican Germany and German-Austria. Scientific anti-Marxism, he argues, attacks Marxist politics while keeping Marxist categories intact, above all class conflict, resentment against capitalism, and contempt for theoretical economics. Tracing how the Historical School and Kathedersozialismus absorbed Marxian ideas even while claiming to refute them, he sets a utilitarian sociology of the division of labor against every struggle theory, whether of class, race, or nation, faulting them for explaining conflict but never association. Werner Sombart serves as the exemplary critic still caught inside the doctrine he renounces. Only science, not nationalist ressentiment, can overcome Marxism. First published 1925.

Wohlgemerkt: nicht der Sozialismus wird angegriffen, sondern der Marxismus, und dem marxistischen Sozialismus wird zum Vorwurf gemacht, daß er gar nicht der richtige, der wahre, der allein anzustrebende Sozialismus sei.

English translation: “Note well: it is not socialism that is attacked, but Marxism, and Marxist socialism is reproached for not being the correct, the true, the only socialism worth striving for.”

A central bank can hold ample reserves yet undermine monetary stability by refusing to redeem its notes. In this six-page discussion contribution from 1925, Ludwig von Mises makes that distinction central to his replies on European monetary reconstruction. His perspective combines a defence of theory’s practical power—including the destructive power of mistaken doctrines—with insistence on unconditional redemption at parity. Austria supplies a revealing test: rising prices and expanding note circulation, he argues, need not prove renewed inflation when world-market adjustment and returning demand for domestic money explain them. This brief intervention shows Mises testing monetary principles against disputed evidence, distinguishing the appearance of stability from its institutional conditions, and the quantity of notes from the public’s willingness to hold them.

A public that has learned to watch exchange rates may frustrate inflationary finance even when governments have learned nothing. In this second contribution to a recorded discussion in 1925, Mises locates the restraint on renewed note printing in the population’s rapid response to depreciation, not in official wisdom. His reply to Spitzmüller raises a different question: does an economist’s prominence make him responsible for policies he opposed? Mises distinguishes his writings and lectures from the powers exercised by ministers and central-bank governors, naming the 1922 stabilization as the sole adopted Austrian monetary measure consistent with his recommendations. This brief, pointed exchange shows both his account of changed public behaviour after inflation and his resistance to being credited with authority he denied possessing.

Not whether the state can decree a price, but what follows when a decreed price is meant to replace the one the market would form: that is the question this theoretical essay on official price fixing pursues within an order still based on private ownership. Mises distinguishes Ordnungstaxen, which hover near the market price and barely disturb it, from genuine controls that push maximum or minimum prices away from the unhampered level. A ceiling breeds shortage, hoarding, rationing, and finally compulsory production; a wage floor breeds unsold labor. Each isolated intervention forces a choice between retreat and further command. Price fixing, he concludes, is no stable third system between capitalism and socialism but cumulative social theory. Reprinted as Theorie der Preistaxen.

Der behördlich festgelegte Preis aber zerstört den Markt, auf dem Waren und Dienste gegen Geld gekauft und verkauft werden.

English translation: “The officially fixed price, however, destroys the market on which goods and services are bought and sold for money.”

After Bolshevik Russia retreated to the New Economic Policy, Mises saw the practical economics of the age settle on a regulated private-property order, neither laissez-faire nor outright expropriation. That third system is his target. Interventionism keeps ownership formal while replacing entrepreneurial calculation with isolated commands, and those commands, he argues, defeat their own ends: a price ceiling below the market breeds shortage, rationing, and finally compulsory production; a legislated or union-enforced wage above productivity turns frictional unemployment into a permanent institution. Corruption and evasion become structural supports rather than accidents. The postwar depression, on this reading, is not the crisis of capitalism but the crisis of interventionism, an order with no economic principle of its own, forced always to retreat or to advance toward socialism.

Entweder Kapitalismus oder Sozialismus; ein Mittelding gibt es nicht.

English translation: “Either capitalism or socialism; there is no middle way.”

The label social liberalism promised a synthesis; Mises reads it instead as an equivocal name for anti-liberal intervention. Framed as a review of the Brentano Festgabe, the essay treats that volume as evidence that Kathedersozialismus and the Historical School have exhausted their scientific content while keeping their political influence. His wedge is ownership of the means of production: liberalism, socialism, and syndicalism are rival institutional arrangements, not moral temperaments, and property as immediate control over production is indivisible. He counts the Methodenstreit settled against the historicists, denies that unions can raise labor's income as a whole by force without cost, and portrays Max Weber breaking painfully from Prussian statism toward liberal conclusions. Socialism, he insists, foundered not on resistance but on its own impracticability.

Nationalökonomische Erkenntnis führt notwendigerweise zum Liberalismus.

English translation: “Economic understanding leads necessarily to liberalism.”

Did the loss of an empire make Austria economically unviable? In this short 1926 address and accompanying discussion response, Mises separates the country’s diminished political territory from its prospects for recovery. He attributes fiscal stabilization to the end of subsidized government food purchases, monetary financing, and excessive expenditure, while warning that budget balance alone does not secure recovery. His reply to a question about Vienna sharpens the distinction: the city’s livelihood rested on industry, finance, and trade, not simply on imperial administration. Even as its financial role declined, he argues, commerce among the successor states offered new opportunities. The pairing captures Mises’s qualified optimism at a concrete postwar juncture, with domestic reform constrained by European trade barriers rather than national size alone.

Mises opens this brief review by contrasting two kinds of socialist historiography: scholarship absorbed in personal trivia and scholarship that clarifies economic ideas. Rodbertus’s letters to Schumacher, edited by Robert Michels and Ernst Ackermann, earn his approval for their attention to agricultural credit, rent, and the social question. His praise is not an endorsement of Rodbertus’s doctrines; it concerns what the correspondence and its supporting documents make intelligible. Even without Schumacher’s replies, Mises finds evidence illuminating both Rodbertus’s thought and Germany’s early imperial years. The review offers a compact instance of Mises judging historical scholarship by its explanatory value rather than dismissing it for its subject’s politics.

For Mises, the missing words in Keynes’s title are decisive: laissez-faire belongs with laissez-passer, the free movement of people and goods. This brief 1927 review of Keynes’s Das Ende des Laissez-Faire turns less on the proposed regulation of private ownership through semi-autonomous bodies than on protectionism and migration restrictions. Mises brings those omissions into focus through the predicament of displaced people and would-be emigrants barred from competing for work abroad. His challenge is pointed: can liberalism be blamed for distress produced, in his judgement, by its abandonment? The review offers a compact encounter with Mises’s insistence that property, trade, and human mobility cannot be assessed as separate freedoms.