The archive.

Do inflation, tariffs, and cartels indict capitalism—or the policies imposed upon it? In this short 1928 review of Eduard Heimann, Ludwig von Mises disputes the move from identifying economic harms to assigning responsibility for them. He turns Heimann’s own concessions about governments, worker-supported parties, and academic economists against the claim that entrepreneurs bear the chief blame for inflation. For Mises, the disorders Heimann condemns arise from interventionism, not capitalism. A parallel dispute concerns whether a morally approved end can justify class struggle when Gospel injunctions prohibit its means. The review offers a compact encounter between Heimann’s religious socialism and Mises’s liberal economic criticism, sharpening the distinction between condemning an outcome and explaining its causes.

Buying Kant out of snobbery, paying extra to support a disabled veteran, or choosing a nearby shop for convenience: are these exceptions to economic explanation, or ordinary instances of valuation? In this essay, presented in its 1933 German republication, Ludwig von Mises argues that price theory must explain actual choices without first approving their motives. His distinctive target is not subjective value theory’s opponents but inconsistencies in its founders, Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, whose substantive achievements he defends. Mistaken beliefs, generosity, and national loyalty enter exchange through buyers’ preferences, not as departures from economic law. The essay makes precise why explaining a purchase differs from judging its purpose—and why monetary gain alone cannot define the conduct economics seeks to understand.

Money cannot simply be added to a theory of barter without changing what that theory explains. This is the central contention of Mises’s short article, which locates an unfinished task within subjective value theory: explaining not merely changes in money’s purchasing power, but how that purchasing power arises. Mises treats monetary economics as essential to understanding market fluctuations and economic calculation, rather than as a specialist appendix. Yet his case for theoretical advance also insists on continuity: he credits Ricardo, not himself or Cassel, with purchasing-power parity theory. The article offers a compact view of why Mises regards abstraction from money as a useful beginning—and an inadequate stopping point—for economic analysis.

Interwar enthusiasm for monetary planning fixed on two dreams: a money of stable purchasing power and a capitalism cleansed of the business cycle. Both exaggerate what policy can know and do. Purchasing power, Mises argues, cannot be measured objectively, since every index imports arbitrary weights, so Fisher's compensated dollar and Keynes's managed currency rest on pseudo-measurement. Gold he defends not as stable but as comparatively shielded from political hands. The second half builds the circulation-credit theory of the Konjunkturzyklus: bank-created fiduciary media push the loan rate below the natural rate, financing production that real saving cannot complete, so the crisis only reveals capital already misdirected. Cycles recur because opinion demands cheap money; his austere remedy extends the Currency School's rule to deposits and abandons the illusion that banking technique can conjure prosperity.

Erst die Konjunkturtheorie läßt uns in der wirren Fülle von Geschehnissen den Wellenzug der Konjunktur erkennen.

English translation: “Only business-cycle theory enables us to discern, amid the confused abundance of events, the wave-motion of the cycle.”

Choosing between two goods is not the same as calculating how best to produce them. This distinction anchors Ludwig von Mises’s 1928 review of recent writings on socialist economic calculation. Against Otto Neurath’s defense of calculation in kind, Mises asks how heterogeneous resources can be brought into a common accounting framework; criticism of capitalist accounting, he insists, does not establish a workable alternative. His strongest endorsement goes to Boris Brutzkus’s analysis of Soviet experience, particularly its challenge to labor-cost accounting in production that also uses capital and natural resources. The review offers a compact encounter with Mises as a critical reader, testing competing proposals against a precise requirement: explaining how a planned economy could compare productive alternatives rather than merely enumerate its resources.

Cooperatives need not replace capitalism to deserve serious study. In this brief 1929 review of Ernst Grünfeld’s handbook volume, Ludwig von Mises distinguishes failed hopes of economic transformation from cooperatives’ durable role as enterprises. His sharpest criticism concerns what an economic account can miss: cooperatives also serve political, religious, cultural, and national commitments. Grünfeld acknowledges these forces in his historical discussions, Mises observes, but leaves them out of his sociology. The review offers a compact example of Mises insisting that organizational purposes cannot be reduced to immediate economic tasks—while warmly endorsing a book whose treatment he finds incomplete.

When the Methodenstreit pitted Menger's theoretical economics against the German historical school, the deeper logical question, whether a science of human action is even possible, went unanswered. Mises returns to it here, arguing that sociology, with economics as its most developed branch, yields universally valid laws rather than Max Weber's ideal types. Scarcity, choice, and the economic principle are not habits of the capitalist epoch but conditions of all action; Gresham's law and subjective value theory hold wherever their premises obtain. He faults historians who imagine they work without theory while leaning on outdated folk economics, and rejects the historicist and Marxist claim that economic laws are bound to particular epochs, a device, he argues, for evading criticism of socialist calculation. History, he concludes, begins only where theory leaves off.

Ohne Theorie ist Geschichte nicht zu denken.

English translation: “History is unthinkable without theory.”

Robert Deumer's prize-winning blueprint for a state monopoly of credit takes nationalization as settled and worries only over its institutional design; Mises attacks the premise instead. Behind the plan lies the belief that private banks finance merely profitable rather than nationally necessary industries, a contrast he dissolves by converting the question of credit allocation into one of consumer sovereignty, since profit expresses the demand of consumers, not the whim of bankers. A nationalized bank, he argues, could never be run commercially: commercial management is inseparable from private ownership, profit-and-loss responsibility, and monetary calculation, so bureaucracy would follow not from bad officials but from the absence of any profitability test. Freed from redemption, such a bank would inflate on political command. Credit nationalization thus approaches full socialization, a late relic of an exhausted statism.

Man kann einen Staatsbetrieb niemals „kommerzialisieren“, auch wenn man noch so viele Äußerlichkeiten der privaten Unternehmung auf ihn überträgt.

English translation: “One can never "commercialize" a state enterprise, no matter how many external features of private enterprise one transfers to it.”

Delivered as a lecture in 1931 amid the deepening Depression, this eight-part address moves from the nature of the market through the business cycle to unemployment, price supports, taxation, and gold. The market, Mises insists, is no anarchy but a form of economic democracy in which consumers, as the final authority, direct production. Crisis appears when policy disables that mechanism: bank credit expansion drives the loan rate below the natural rate, building a boom on sand, while union wages held above market-clearing levels, sustained by unemployment relief, turn joblessness chronic. Price supports for coffee and wheat, protective tariffs, and capital-consuming taxation deepen the disorder. The single way out, he argues, is to abandon every attempt to prevent market prices from shaping production.

Die kapitalistische Marktwirtschaft ist eine Demokratie, in der jeder Groschen eine Wahlstimme gibt.

English translation: “The capitalist market economy is a democracy in which every penny casts a vote.”

Territorial partition could not neatly separate peoples who lived alongside one another. This is the premise of Ludwig von Mises’s brief 1932 review of Rudolph Sieghart’s account of the Habsburg Empire’s final decades. Mises reads the former official’s history as evidence for both the rationale and the defeat of a reform project: transforming the monarchy into a kind of East European League of Nations. His endorsement contains a pointed distinction: Sieghart explains, against his own intentions, why the policy failed. The review offers a compact statement of Mises’s judgement that nationalism had defeated a plausible framework for cooperation without resolving the region’s political and economic conflicts.

As the Depression hardened public opinion into a verdict, capitalism has failed and only planned economy or socialism remains, Mises answers that the verdict mistakes its object. What collapsed was not liberal capitalism but decades of anti-capitalist policy: nationalization, municipal enterprise, tariffs, union privilege, unemployment relief, social insurance, inflation, militarism. Economics, he argues, discovered market laws no coercive power can override, and liberalism is simply the practical application of that discovery, not a class morality; the isolated intervention cannot reach its aim and produces effects its own authors never wanted. Even businessmen turned interventionist prove only that they too absorb their age's ideas, as success comes to hinge on connections rather than serving consumers well and cheaply. The crisis, he concludes, belongs to interventionism: not Bastiat but Marx and Schmoller failed.

Gegen Logik setzten sie Ethik, gegen Theorie Ressentiment, gegen Argumente den Hinweis auf den Willen des Staates.

English translation: “Against logic they set ethics, against theory resentment, against arguments the appeal to the will of the state.”

Taking up Karl Knies's proposal to rank means of exchange as a third class beside consumer and producer goods, Mises, read here in the English translation of the 1932 original, builds a subjective theory of money's value. Its worth, he argues, springs from demanded monetary services, not from any intrinsic material use, and analysis must start from the individual's cash balance rather than aggregates like velocity or the equation of exchange. He rescues the quantity theory's core while discarding its mechanical version: new money enters through particular hands and redistributes wealth before prices adjust, never proportionally or all at once. A sharp line separates money proper, fully backed certificates, and unbacked fiduciary media, the last being what truly moves prices and interest. Perfectly stable money, he concludes, is a wish to escape the temporal nature of capitalism itself.

Only with the use of money is it possible to compare the marginal utility of goods in all alternative employments.