The archive.

To ask an economist for the date a boom will break is to ask for the one thing economics cannot deliver—yet businessmen, knowing an artificial boom must end, press for exactly that. The monetary theory of the cycle is 'irrefutable,' Mises grants in this 1956 essay: forcing interest rates below their market level through bank credit distorts production and guarantees an eventual depression. But economics is qualitative, not quantitative; it can say the boom will not last, never precisely when it will break, for human action offers none of the constant relations natural science exploits. Statistics only describe the past. And a correct public forecast would annul itself—if everyone believed it, they would sell at once and bring the crash forward on the spot.

At the very instant this forecast was uttered and accepted as correct, the crisis would already be consummated.

No accidental byproduct of capitalism, lasting mass unemployment is for Mises the predictable effect of wage rates held above what the market would clear—by minimum-wage law, or by unions that raise members' pay only by excluding outsiders. From marginal productivity and consumer sovereignty he builds toward a monetary argument: unwilling to confront union power, governments turned to currency devaluation to cut real wages by stealth, until unions learned to index their demands to the cost of living. Keynes enters as no true theorist but the man who gave old inflationism a fresh watchword. The only genuine cure for mass unemployment, Mises concludes, is the return of freedom to the labor market; sound money and free labor pricing stand or fall together.

All Keynes accomplished was to coin a new slogan — “full employment” — which became the motto of present-day policies of inflation and credit expansion.

The saver, in Mises's telling here—rendered into English from the 1957 German 'Der Sparer als Wähler'—is no marginal figure begging paternal favor but a structural pillar of capitalism, since to defend savings is to defend property, capital formation, and the rising real wages they finance. Genuine protection of savers, he insists, differs entirely from protectionist privilege: it means securing the legal and monetary order in which accumulated capital can survive. His sharpest move recasts the ordinary wage earner, with his savings account and life-insurance policy, as a creditor—one whom inflation quietly robs. The democratic danger is epistemic: voters mistake inflation for mere rising prices rather than an expansion of money and credit, and so demand the cheap-money policies that erode their own claims. Only patient explanation to the voter, he concludes, offers a way out.

The American "common man," as a saver and especially as an owner of life insurance policies, is a creditor to a much greater degree than was the average German of the Weimar Republic.

The decline of classical liberalism is, in Mises's telling, the one fact that renders modern history intelligible, the return of doctrines that pit class against class, nation against nation, and race against race in place of the market's harmony of rightly understood interests. Originally a reply to a 1957 questionnaire, this compact polemic defines capitalism not as rule by big business but as consumer sovereignty and mass production for the common man, and defends higher output as the moral condition of lower infant mortality and vanishing famine. There is no stable third way, he maintains: each interference with prices, wages, or profits distorts coordination and breeds the next, so reformism slides toward gradual socialization. Sound money, he adds, is the constitutional barrier against escape through inflation.

Interventionism cannot be considered a lasting system of society's economic organization. It is a method of realizing socialism by installment.

How could monetary expansion remain an implausible explanation of the mark’s depreciation to economists witnessing it? In this 1959 essay, Mises locates the roots of Germany’s 1923 currency catastrophe in an intellectual culture that made ethical intentions, national loyalty, and confidence in state authority tests of economic truth. His distinctive evidence is a surviving 1914 memorandum of objections raised against Böhm-Bawerk and himself: interest theory became a defence of unearned income, while monetary institutions were judged by their usefulness for war. Explicit about the limits of his recollections and missing notes, Mises offers a participant’s account of how rival explanations were excluded from debate. The essay’s particular interest lies in this connection between scholarly judgement and policy: arguments could lose a hearing not because they had been refuted, but because their presumed purposes were condemned.

Die Ideen, die die Politik der Völker leiten, fallen nicht vom Himmel.

English translation: “The ideas which guide the policies of nations do not fall from heaven.”

Every political conflict of the age, Mises insists, is at bottom economic, which makes economic theory a civic necessity rather than a specialist's luxury. This short review-essay uses the new complete English translation of Bohm-Bawerk's Capital and Interest to redefine the general reader as a citizen whose political judgment depends on theoretical literacy: whoever debates inflation, unions, taxation, or socialism without grasping economic fundamentals merely parrots what he has picked up from others no better informed. Mises supplies a reading order, beginning with the second volume on saving, capital, value, and price, then the critical history of interest theories in the first, and singles out the refutation of Marx's labor theory of value as the politically decisive chapter. Abstract theory, he argues, is the West's sharpest weapon against Soviet destructionism.

There is no doubt that Böhm-Bawerk's book is the most eminent contribution to modern economic theory.

Ownership gives entrepreneurs control over production—but, in Mises’s account, consumers continually put that control to the test. This encyclopedia entry from the Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften presents the market as a process in which purchases, profits, and losses redirect productive resources under conditions of uncertainty. Its central tension lies between private command over wealth and dependence on buyers’ choices. Mises sharpens the argument by distinguishing monopoly ownership from the ability to profit by restricting supply, and by explaining entrepreneurial profit as a temporary result of anticipating change rather than a permanent reward for possession. Readers can trace how consumer sovereignty becomes not only his explanation of market coordination but also his standard for defending inequality and criticizing redistribution.

Strip away the geopolitical alarmism, Mises urges, and the contest between socialism and capitalism reduces to a single measurable test: whether socialism raises the ordinary person's standard of living, as its advocates always promised. By that self-chosen standard, he argues, Soviet planning had already failed—decades of plans, purges, and boasts had left the common man far poorer than his counterpart in capitalist Western Europe or the United States. Capitalism, in this compressed Cold War essay, is nothing but mass production for the masses, a system that raises the worker toward the bourgeois level by serving him. The regime's censorship is itself the confession: it endures only by keeping its citizens from learning how ordinary people live under freedom.

Experience has belied all this empty boasting.

Against the socialist promise that collective ownership will deliver both abundance and perfect freedom, this 1960 review of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty rebuilds the liberal meaning of liberty from the ground up. Freedom, Mises insists, is not escape from scarcity or natural necessity but a social relation: voluntary contractual cooperation set against authoritarian command, in which one will subordinates all others and moral agency decays into obedience. Crediting Hayek's argument that control of the means is control of every end, he concludes that economic direction cannot be quarantined from the rest of life. His sharpest turn is against Hayek himself—the welfare state, Mises argues, is not a stable middle way but a gradual method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism, ending, like outright nationalization, in the authoritarian state.

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.

The gravest danger to American freedom, this 1960 essay warns, is neither military conquest nor open revolution but the interventionist policies embraced by mainstream parties that denounce communism while cherishing planning. Mises collapses the distinction between socialism, communism, and planning—each substitutes one government plan for the plans of individual citizens—and insists economic control cannot be walled off from press, employment, and assembly. Inflation is planning's most insidious ally: the expansion of money and money substitutes creates no wealth, only a hidden redistribution toward first receivers. Its subtlest victim is the thrifty householder, whom capitalism had deproletarianized into a creditor through savings, insurance, and pensions, and whom inflation reproletarianizes by dissolving those very claims. Sound money thus becomes a constitutional safeguard—and, Mises argues, a frontline defense against the appeal of communism.

If somebody says he is opposed to communism, but cherishes socialism, he is no more consistent or logical than a man who declares that he is opposed to murder but cherishes assassination.

A moral command means nothing addressed to a slave: this premise opens Mises's 1960 argument that freedom is a postulate not only of politics but of every morality, since only an agent who can weigh alternatives and restrain impulse can be held responsible. From moral anthropology the essay builds outward to the market, where the consumer is sovereign and private property functions as a revocable public mandate rather than feudal privilege. Its decisive claim is the indivisibility of freedom: because every human act requires material means, a state that controls production also controls the paper, presses, halls, and broadcasting through which conscience and dissent must speak. Constitutional liberties, Mises warns, become empty once economic independence from government disappears.

He who monopolizes all media of communication has full power to keep a tight hand on the individuals' minds and souls.

Asked what he had done in the Great War, the British economist Edwin Cannan answered simply that he had raised his voice against the folly around him—and for Mises that reply names the political virtue Germany lacked. Reviewing Volkmar Muthesius's Frankfurt monthly Monatsblätter für freiheitliche Wirtschaftspolitik, he argues that the catastrophes of early-twentieth-century Germany followed from interventionism, inflationism, and fiscal mismanagement met with silence rather than dissent. The magazine matters as a rare postwar voice defending free trade, sound money, and balanced budgets while attacking subsidies, union privilege, and antimonopoly demagogy. Written at the height of the Cold War, the review links West Germany's liberal recovery to American resolve over Berlin and to Goldwater-style fiscal conservatism, presenting an independent free-market periodical in the classic land of socialism as itself a remarkable achievement.

The great catastrophes that befell Germany in the first part of our century were the inevitable effect of its political and economic policies.