Many advocates of interventionism are bewildered when one tells them that in recommending interventionism they themselves are fostering anti-democratic and dictatorial tendencies and the establishment of totalitarian socialism. They protest that they are sincere...
Ludwig Von Mises
Planned Chaos: The Failure of Interventionism (Part 2 of 11)
NOTHING is more unpopular today than the free market economy, i.e., capitalism. Everything that is considered unsatisfactory in present-day conditions is charged to capitalism. The atheists make capitalism responsible for the survival of Christianity. But the papal...
Planned Chaos: Introduction (Part 1 of 11)
The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anticapitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties are eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise. It is an almost unchallenged dogma that capitalism...
The Alleged Absence of Depressions Under Totalitarian Management
Many socialist authors emphasize that the recurrence of economic crises and business depressions is a phenomenon inherent in the capitalist mode of production. On the other hand, they say, a socialist system is safe against this evil. As has already become obvious and...
In Defense of the “Barbarous Relic”: Why The Enemies of Capitalism Smear The Gold Standard
Given the state of affairs created by the U.S. Central Banking system this classic on Free Banking and the Gold Standard by Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) is all the more relevant today . Excerpted from his book "Human Action: A Treatise on Economics"...
Monetary Policy and the Return to Sound Money
Excerpted from Chapter 23, Part IV of Mises classic The Theory of Money and Credit (1912).The people of all countries agree that the present state of monetary affairs is unsatisfactory and that a change is highly desirable. However, ideas about the kind of reform...
The Freedom To Move as an International Problem
There are extensive tracts of land, comparable to those in Europe, which are sparsely settled. The United States of America and the British dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on, are less heavily populated, in comparison with their...
Politics & Ideas: The Battle Over Ideas (Lecture 6, Part 4 of 4)
In contrast, however, the interventionist ideas, the socialist ideas, the inflationist ideas of our time, have been concocted and formalized by writers and professors. And they are taught at colleges and universities. You may say: "Today's situation is much worse." I...
Politics & Ideas: The Rise and Decline of Civilization (Lecture 6, Part 3 of 4)
People say that every civilization must finally fall into ruin and disintegrate. There are eminent supporters of this idea. One was a German teacher, Spengler, and another one, much better known, was the English historian, Toynbee. They tell us that our civilization...
Politics & Ideas: The Philosophy of Interventionism (Lecture 6, Part 2 of 4)
Under interventionist ideas, it is the duty of the government to support, to subsidize, to give privileges to special groups. The idea of the eighteenth century statesmen was that the legislators had special ideas about the common good. But what we have today,...
Politics & Ideas: The Interdependence of Economics and Politics (Lecture 6, Part 1 of 4)
In the Age of Enlightenment in the years in which the North Americans founded their independence, and a few years later, when the Spanish and Portuguese colonies were transformed into independent nations, the prevailing mood in Western civilization was optimistic. At...
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