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NOTE Liberty and Economics: The Ludwig von Mises Legacy

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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The individual consumer should be concerned about economics and economic theory because

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you just, by the words we use here, you suggest the answer. They are consumers. That is, they

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are people who go into the market and they would like to have the largest choice of products.

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They would like to have those products at the best possible price. And there's one

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Well, all that stuff is economics, and whether or not we have jobs, how much we're taxed,

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how much inflation we have, whether we have good housing or poor housing, whether we have

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Lots of food or little food, VCR or CD player or any of that stuff, that's all economics.

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And so therefore, everyone is living economics every day of the year.

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One of Mises' insights is that in a market system, the consumer is king, right?

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Who determines what businesses produce?

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Who determines in what quantities goods are produced or services are produced?

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Who determines when a factory should open and when a factory should close, when is it

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obsolete?

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Mises says it's the consumer ultimately who does this.

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The consumer goes into the market and with every dollar he votes on, I want this, I don't

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want this.

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That's how a market system works.

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And if we don't understand it, as many societies have not, we end up like Eastern Europe.

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There's no food in the stores or where they have massive systemic problems of economic

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coordination where they've got grain rotting in the fields and no bread.

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And that's what happens when people don't understand economics.

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Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist, became this century's most uncompromising champion

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of Individual Liberty.

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In a career spanning over 60 years, Mises, the preeminent scholar, prolific writer and

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revered teacher, developed a body of scientific theory in support of the free market economy.

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Mises set out to prove that economic prosperity laid not in the hands of interventionist government,

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but in the unrestricted actions of individuals, buying, selling and producing in an open market.

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Having witnessed the abuses of statism during the communist and fascist tides that swept

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Europe into the darkness of two world wars, Mises fought the prevailing statist political

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and economic policies of his time for the advancement of freedom.

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You have to admire the wonderful austerity of an intellect that could pursue truth in

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the kind of atmosphere he came into when the alternatives were simply assumed to be one

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or the other version of statism.

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We understood that they were all the same thing, that they were all doomed to fail,

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is to fail in their terms. They do succeed for their rulers, not for their subjects.

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It's a real enigma why people are so averse to real free market capitalism even now.

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Here we are in the century that has seen Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot,

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And we're still being warned against the robber barons of the 19th century.

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I don't know that Jay Gould or John D. Rockefeller ever killed anyone.

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The state has killed countless people, and yet we're always supposed to remain on guard

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against these greedy villains of yesteryear.

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I would say that Mises was great because he was so profound and so conscientious, so determined

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and so consistent and persistent in seeking the truth and setting it forth as he understood it.

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The values he was attempting to defend and did defend were American values. There were the values

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of individual freedom, there were the values of limited government, there were the values of human

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rights protected from government intrusion, there were the values of opportunity for

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for all people, the values of letting people earn what they could, keep what they earned, and not have it taken away by an intrusive government.

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But I guess in thinking about it, the most impressive thing was the man's integrity, his honesty, his belief in individuals and individual liberty.

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On September 11, 1981, in a moving speech delivered on the 100th anniversary of her husband's birth, Marget von Mises describes the man she knew.

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What I can tell you about Ludwig von Mises, the man, is this.

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He was first of all a human being concerned about the state of the world, and foremost, he was a fighter.

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As Hamlet says, he was a man.

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Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

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For Ludwig von Mises was far more than an eminent economist.

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He understood history as few historians understand it.

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He was learned in psychology, philosophy, law and government, but his intellectual creative

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energy was directed towards one goal, freedom.

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for himself and for all mankind.

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As a young boy in Vienna during the late 1800s,

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Mises developed an intense interest in history.

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I was then not yet seven years old and devoured those articles with insatiable fervor. But

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It was my intense interest in historical knowledge that enabled me to readily perceive the inadequacy

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of German historicism.

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It did not deal with scientific problems, but with the glorification of Prussian policies

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and Prussian authoritarian government.

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Mises discovered when he was a young student that historians and other experts in social

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sciences were not as devoted to the perceived truth as they thought.

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By 1900, practically everyone in the German-speaking countries was either a statist or a state socialist.

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Capitalism was seen as a bad episode which fortunately had ended forever.

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The future belonged to the state.

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All others were to be regulated in a way that would prevent businessmen from exploiting

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Inventing Workers and Consumers

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When he got to be university age, he went to the University of Vienna, back in Vienna then,

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and at that time he was sort of an ordinary left liberal, sort of what gets known in those

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days as a Fabian Socialist.

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And he was set to investigating the housing problem, and he did a paper, a master's thesis

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for a professor.

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In the meantime, he read Carl Menger's Principles of Economics. Carl Menger was the founder of the Austrian School of Economics. He was the major professor at the University of Vienna.

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And he read it and that changed his life. He then saw that economics was really a theory, it was a whole way of looking at the market, and it was a set of laws that you could apply to any situation.

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Mises had witnessed first-hand how government intervention in the housing market had created a shortage of low-cost rents for the laboring poor in Vienna.

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High taxes levied on real estate profits had created a disincentive for entrepreneurs to invest in additional housing.

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It then dawned on me that all the real improvements in the conditions of the working classes were the result of capitalism, and that social laws frequently brought about the very opposite of what the legislation was intended for.

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To the extent that we're taxed, we literally don't know what we're doing.

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The fruit of our action, the consequence of our action, is taken from us.

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It may be put to good use, it always allegedly is.

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I'm skeptical of that, but let's give the state the benefit of the doubt.

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Let's suppose Tip O'Neill really is another Mother Teresa,

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and that people like this are using our money more charitably than we would.

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We would. Okay, but we don't know that. So, humanly speaking, we're simply not going to keep making the same effort we did before to acquire it.

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I always say there's a three-word lexicon that explains the tax economy. Need, greed, and compassion.

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Need now means wanting someone else's money. Greed means wanting to keep your own.

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And compassion is the sentiment of the politician who wants to arrange the transfer.

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These good old words have been completely perverted, in other words, by the tax economy.

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After the receipt of his doctorate degree, Mises began his first monumental work in the field of economics.

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In his book published in 1912, The Theory of Money and Credit, Mises examined the problems of currency.

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The Austrian theory explains in a way that other schools of economic thought have been unable to explain why it is the government, the central bank, the overextension of credit, the creation of too much money that in effect inevitably almost sets the stage for an economic downturn.

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and of course politicians being very short sighted and only thinking to the next six months or the next election

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will like the euphoric short term sense that you get from excess money creation

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but they never could quite understand why that creates bad economic conditions down the road

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as individuals and businesses and the economy are unable to sustain the economic activity

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The Austrian Theory explains that it is the inflation that governments are so prone to engage in that sets the stage for economic bad times.

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at times and if you go through history and look at when we've had periods of economic

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contraction they are almost always associated with some sort of mismanagement of the monetary

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system by the government.

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Mises argued very strongly for the gold standard because he was aware of the fact that if you

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If you had a gold standard, you couldn't have a government agency, the central bank, counterfeiting the money, because he knew that caused the business cycle and he didn't want a business cycle to be reoccurring.

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It's also argued that the gold standard provides stable prices and economic growth, and I strongly believe this, as all Austrian economists do.

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But the most important point about a gold standard is that the money comes from the marketplace and doesn't come from the politicians.

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It's, you know, if you had a primitive culture, people wouldn't be picking up pieces of paper and exchanging them and calling them money.

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So it's only in this so-called sophisticated modern economy where people are deceived into believing that pieces of paper have value.

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And creating duplications of pieces of paper don't create wealth. The only thing that creates wealth is production.

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The gold standard provides an honest exchange.

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That doesn't mean that every transaction has to be gold. You can have a gold certificate that can only be printed when there's gold behind it.

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So the true gold standard is that the gold and the paper money are equal. You can't print up a lot of paper.

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And by the way, when the United States went off the gold standard in 1933, I know, thousands of economists literally attacked it.

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They would have petitioned the Congress saying, go back to the gold standard. Of course, that's all been forgotten now.

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The outbreak of World War I interrupted the careers of many people in Europe, and Mises

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was no exception.

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After three years at the front as an artillery officer, Mises developed typhoid and spent

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the remainder of his service working for the economics division of the Ministry of War.

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After the war, he couldn't get a paid teaching post and he got this Privat Dotsend post at

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the University of Vienna where he had a seminar but he was discriminated against and he was

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the lone man on the totem pole in the department and he couldn't find a paid post anywhere.

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His friends and students say there were three reasons for this.

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One, that he was Jewish and anti-Semitism was already rampant in Austria and in Germany.

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Two, that he believed in laissez-faire, uncompromising laissez-faire,

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and Germany and Austria were both moving rapidly toward the idea of the corporate state,

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essentially fascism, or Marxism. These were the only two options.

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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To earn a living, Mises held a post with the Vienna Chamber of Commerce as an economic

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advisor to the Austrian government.

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It was here that Mises wielded considerable influence into Austria's political and economic

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destiny.

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After World War I, amidst the turmoil of defeat, many Eastern European nations looked to the

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example of the Russian Revolution and followed the communist tide. Austria's fate now laid

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in the hands of its Marxist leader Otto Bauer.

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And he wanted to bring about a communist system. He dedicated his whole life to that, to being

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a pure Marxist-Leninist. And Mises sat for two straight days and nights or something

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Communism, but post-war bank credit inflation proved to be a greater enemy.

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During World War I, most European nations had abandoned the gold standard and Mises

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had to fight the modern rage for cheap money. He pressed for a balanced budget

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and a halt to all increases in paper currency. The Austrian crown stabilized

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in 1922, although it was greatly depreciated. Unable to forestall the

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and the inflationary effects of continued government spending, the Austrian bank collapsed in 1931.

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Mises also predicted the Great Depression, but the only economist in those days, because he realized,

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because it was a business cycle theory, that there was going to be a big crash, and everybody else was saying,

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no, we have a new era, we have a central banking, we have a Fed, and therefore it's going to be permanent prosperity without depression.

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In the meantime, while he was doing this, he was teaching at the University of Vienna and writing great books, marvelous books,

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of the World.

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Plus, he was holding a private seminar in his Chamber of Commerce office, which was

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totally unaccredited, and nobody has anything from it.

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And it was considered a great honor to be invited to attend this private seminar.

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This Mises private seminar, which continued from about 1920 to, I think, 1934 when he

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left Austria, was the center in all of Europe for intellectual, not only for economics but

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for philosophy and history and political science and all that, for research and discussion.

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All who belong to this circle came voluntarily, guided only by their thirst for knowledge.

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In these meetings we discussed all important problems of economics and the sciences of human

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action.

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In this circle the younger school of Austrian economics lived on.

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In this circle the Viennese culture produced one of its last blossoms.

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Here I was neither teacher nor director of the seminar.

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I was merely primus inter paris, first among peers, who himself benefited more than he gave.

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One of Mises' famous students, Felix Kaufman, who was a philosopher of science, made up

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a whole set of songs about the Mises Seminar.

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They took V&E songs of the period and put lyrics about Mises in it, and they sang it

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to us at this Vienna a few years ago.

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It was just great.

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Kinder hört's mir an, weil heute Freitag ist, gibt es Mises Privatseminar. Und dort geh ich hin, wenn auch ein Metakiss, süß und duftend, wie keiner noch war.

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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Vienna Seminar student, Friedrich von Hayek, later won the Nobel Prize in Economics for

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Business Cycle Theories, rooted to Mises' teachings. In a speech delivered in his professor's

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honor in 1956, Hayek described Mises' influence.

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Professor Mises wrote the book which made the most profound impression on my generation,

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Socialism, which appeared in 1922.

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To none of us young men who read the book when it appeared

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was the world ever the same again.

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Not that we at once swallowed it all, for that it was too strong a medicine

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and too bitter a pill.

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Professor Mises' teaching seemed directed against all we had been brought up to believe.

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It was a time when all the fashionable arguments seemed to point to socialism

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and nearly all good men among the intellectuals were socialists.

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For the young idealist of the time,

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it meant the dashing of all his hopes.

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His book Socialism

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is a devastating critique of the system, that the system would not work and of

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course he's been

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proven correct. His smaller book on liberalism of course looks at

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the alternative of liberal society

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where individuals are free to make their choices, to pursue their own values, he talks about the

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political implications of these two different societies. Again, one being a coercive society,

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socialism, one being a society where men and women deal with each other on the basis of mutual

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exchange. And he did all of this during one of the grimmest times of our history. I mean,

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I mean, I think it's a shame that a man of that caliber, and I think historical importance, never won a Nobel Prize.

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He certainly, if anyone deserved a Nobel Prize in economics for new and original insights, Mises did.

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But socialism failed to my mind because just it couldn't succeed.

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And Ludwig von Mises and his work, Economic Calculation and the Socialist Commonwealth, which was published in 1920,

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In his monumental treatise Socialism, which was published first in 1922,

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he predicted that socialism just will not work.

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It will not work because it has a systemic failure,

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the absence of the rational economic calculation under the socialist conditions.

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And that's why they would never achieve any kind of rational distribution and allocation of resources.

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Then also I think a lot of people there are instinctive libertarians because if you spend

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your life under the government which actually regulates all aspects of your life, then the

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natural reaction to that would be just down with the government bureaucracy.

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That's why the instinctive free marketeers, there's plenty of them in the Soviet Union.

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And today there is a large section of intellectuals who are very much interested in really free

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market economics in the works of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

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What worries me most is the fact that this interventionism still hasn't been discredited,

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that it has held on through all its failures and keeps increasing in strength.

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When the Berlin Wall was torn down, the immediate reaction of most people in the West was, we've

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won.

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Communism has been defeated, freedom has been vindicated and yet people took from that only

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the narrow lesson that communism was wrong or wouldn't work.

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They didn't draw the deeper, more general lesson that state interference destroys economic

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life and freedom together.

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Anticipating the arrival of Nazism in Vienna, Mises took a teaching position in Geneva, Switzerland in 1934.

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It would be his only full-time professorship in his lifetime.

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Shortly thereafter, in 1938, Hitler invaded Vienna.

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The Austrian Nazis, by the way, were even worse than the German Nazis, much more hopped up.

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And the Austrian Nazis burned his library, had a great library, apparently, and burned it, because he was persona non grata and all that in Austria.

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So he was deeply affected by it, no question about that.

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The Swiss, of course, would never invade it, but they didn't know that at the time.

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They thought Hitler might invade Switzerland, and the Swiss put pressure on refugees to get out.

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They weren't very happy, they were afraid Hitler might attack them.

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So when France fell in the spring of 1940, they fled. It was really like a movie.

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He and his wife just got out, fled through southern France in front of the Nazi armies,

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and just made it to Lisbon, I think, and took a boat to New York.

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When Mises was forced to flee Europe in 1940, all of his hopes and dreams were shattered.

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He had to leave his beloved Europe and he had to come to the United States without a

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job, without any prospects.

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And he was in the age of about 60 and fleeing in this whole terrible situation.

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It is a matter of temperament how we shape our lives in the knowledge of inescapable

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catastrophe.

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In high school, I had chosen a verse by Virgil as my motto, do not yield to the bad, but always

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oppose it with courage. In the darkest hours of the war, I recalled this dictum. I would

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not lose courage, even now. I would do everything an economist could do, and I would not tire

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in professing what I knew to be right.

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So he comes to the United States, and by that time the American electoral atmosphere was

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The Great Depression was blamed on capitalism, blamed on the free market.

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The assumption was that in the 1920s we had a free market, therefore something must have been screwed up by the free market.

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Therefore you need socialism to correct it.

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Of course, the Mises inside messed everything up.

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The Federal Reserve system was not even considered because nobody knew about it, basically, in the United States.

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In this atmosphere, the most prestigious universities were very friendly to German refugees from Europe.

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Every Marxist social scientist got top posts in New School, Harvard, Princeton, whatever.

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And Mises coming in with an unfashionable position, could not get a university post.

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Henry Hazlitt, a columnist for the New York Times, had reviewed Mises' book on socialism in 1937.

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This book, Hazlitt wrote, is the most devastating analysis of socialism yet written.

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Mises has written an economic classic in our time.

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Haslett befriended Mises in New York, and with the help of Larry Furtig, a free market businessman, they secured Mises a teaching post at New York University.

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With his salary subsidized privately, Mises began his famous New York seminar, similar to his Vienna seminar on economics.

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I never heard of Mises was still alive. I was dumbfounded when I found out he was still alive and teaching in NYU, conducting a seminar,

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Seminar, which was open to the interest of the people as well as the registered students.

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So I started going to it and fortunately I went about I think the first year of the seminar

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and before 1949, just when Human Action was coming out, Human Action came out about a

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month after the start of the seminar, and when somebody told me that Mises was writing

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a book, a big new book, I said, what's it on?

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When Mises talked, you may not have really heard of this idea before, or heard of it in this way, but when he talked, it all made sense.

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It finally dawned on you that there was, say, an answer, or a possible answer, to a tough question.

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And an answer that wasn't brooded about by anyone else.

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He was extremely tolerant of different views, and yet he was extremely...

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Well, the word intransigent has been used to describe him,

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which some people consider stubborn or obstinate,

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but it also could mean that you have the courage of your convictions.

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And he did, and I think it was having the courage of his convictions

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that enabled him to stand up to the whole world.

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Well, the most important thing about Mises in my recollection

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was he really wasn't teaching economics as such.

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He was teaching thinking.

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He was teaching us to look beneath the surface of events to find out what was really happening to cause the surface to move as it did.

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He was teaching us to be disciplined in our way of thinking, not simply to be confused by random phenomena,

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but to look for patterns, to look for reasons, to look for order in the phenomena.

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and he taught us to question our implicit assumptions about things and he was very, very interested in discussions at that level before one got to the e-comm.

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As you know, Human Action is really not a book about economics, it's a book about people, a book about the world, it's a book about human behavior and thinking.

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Many free market thinkers begin, as it were, by talking about the economy.

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They say, well, the market is good or bad for one reason or another, or bathtubs or

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less bathtubs or something like that.

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Mises started right at the basis.

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His economics was grounded in human nature.

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Mises said that man has a certain nature, that human action as such is action towards

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ends.

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If you want to put the economics of Ludwig von Mises into one word, that word is liberty.

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That is, that the free society is the moral society, is the prosperous society, is the

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rational society, is the good society.

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And to the extent that our liberties are undermined, are circumscribed by government, are lessened,

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are suppressed, are oppressed, to that extent are we less than fully human, are we poorer

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and Are We Not Truly Americans.

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To support the growing interest in Austrian economics, in 1981 on the 100th anniversary

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of Ludwig von Mises' birth, Llewellyn H. Rockwell became the founder and president

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of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

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The institute obviously exists in order to advance the ideas of Mises.

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We do this both in the academic world and among the general public exactly as Mises

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himself always sought to do.

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So we have scholarships for graduate students who share Mises' ideas, we put on teaching

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programs, we publish books, academic journals, newsletters, monographs, and we work in the

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general public with the media to try to do everything possible, if I can put it in the

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thumbnail sketch, to get the government off our backs.

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All of the spiritual and material achievements of Western civilization were the result of the idea of liberty.

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Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders.

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No one is relieved of his or her responsibility by others,

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and no one can find a safe way out if society is sweeping towards destruction.

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Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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The Theory of Money and Credit