‘Economics deals with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen.’
– Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
‘In the early 1920s, Mises predicted that the newly organized Soviet Union had set up an unviable economic system that would not be able to survive. Mises based his death verdict (made in his book, Socialism, shortly after the Russian Revolution) on the principle that a society cannot rely on political committees to set market prices as the commissars were trying to do; only the freely demonstrated choices of the market can produce functioning prices. All artificial prices are unworkable; they cannot tell the central planners which goods are expensive and which are cheap, so it would be impossible for them to organize production in an efficient way.
Without real prices, there could be no economization. Mises was derided for this analysis, even to the end of his life. But Mises was right, and history has approved his verdict, although he passed away without receiving due accolades. Even posthumously — when the Russian monster collapsed in 1989 — recognition of his genius was scant.’
– Joseph Keckeissen, What Would Mises Say?, March 25, 2009
‘The Mises Institute’s coat of arms is that of the Mises family, awarded in 1881 when Ludwig von Mises’s great-grandfather Mayer Rachmiel Mises was ennobled by the Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria. In the upper right-hand quadrant is the staff of Mercury, god of commerce and communication (the Mises family was successful in both; they were merchants and bankers). In the lower left-hand quadrant is a representation of the Ten Commandments. Mayer Rachmiel, as well as his father, presided over various Jewish cultural organizations in Lemberg, the city where Ludwig was born. The red banner displays the Rose of Sharon, which in the litany is one of the names given to the Blessed Mother, as well as the Stars of the Royal House of David, a symbol of the Jewish people. Ludwig’s lifelong motto was from Virgil: tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito. Here is a full view.
During this period, in his first great work, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912)Mises performed what had been deemed an impossible task: to integrate the theory of money into the general theory of marginal utility and price (what would now be called integrating “macroeconomics” into “microeconomics.”) Since Bohm-Bawerk and his other Austrian colleagues did not accept Mises’s integration and remained without a monetary theory, he was therefore obliged to strike out on his own and found a “neo-Austrian” school.
In his monetary theory, Mises revived the long forgotten British Currency School principle, prominent until the 1850s, that society does not at all benefit from any increase in the money supply, that increased money and bank credit only causes inflation and business cycles, and that therefore government policy should maintain the equivalent of a 100 percent gold standard.
Mises added to this insight the elements of his business cycle theory: that credit expansion by the banks, in addition to causing inflation, makes depressions inevitable by causing “malinvestment,” i.e. by inducing businessmen to overinvest in “higher orders” of capital goods (machine tools, construction, etc.) and to underinvest in consumer goods.
The problem is that inflationary bank credit, when loaned to business, masquerades as pseudo-savings, and makes businessmen believe that there are more savings available to invest in capital goods production than consumers are genuinely willing to save. Hence, an inflationary boom requires a recession which becomes a painful but necessary process by which the market liquidates unsound investments and reestablishes the investment and production structure that best satisfies consumer preferences and demands.
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In adition to setting himself against all the political trends of the twentieth century, Mises combated with equal fervor and eloquence what he considered the disastrous dominant philosophical and methodological trends, in economics and other disciplines. These included positivism, relativism, historicism, polylogism” the idea that each race and gender has its own “logic” and therefore cannot communicate with other groups), and all forms of irrationalism and denial of objective truth. Mises also developed what he considered to be the proper methodology of economic theory–logical deduction from evident axioms, which he labeled “praxeology”, and he leveled trenchant critiques of the growing tendency in economics and other disciplines to replace praxeology and historical understanding by unrealistic mathematical models and statistical manipulations.’
– Murray N. Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)
