Ludwig Von Mises

"There is no single man to whom I owe more intellectually, even though he [Mises] was never my teacher in the institutional sense of the word."

"Though I learned that he [Mises] usually was right in his conclusions, I wasn't always satisfied by his arguments, and retained to the end a certain critical attitude which sometimes forced me to build different constructions, which however, to my great pleasure, usually led to the same conclusions. I am to the present moment pursuing the questions which he made me see, and that, I believe is the greatest benefit one scientist can confer on one of the next generation."

"...there I came to know him (Mises) mainly as a tremendously efficient executive, the kind of man who, as was said of John Stuart Mill, because he does a normal day's work in two hours, always has a clear desk and time to talk about anything. I came to know him as one of the best educated and informed men I have ever known..."

"I probably was ... when I began my study, called the Fabian kind of approach and convinced that there must be intelligent solution of the many dissatisfactory events of this world. And so it was as a mild socialist, that I decided I must study economics. I was very soon 'cured' of these beliefs that socialism was the solution because I came after three years, and as a direct influence of Ludwig von Mises, who had then published his great book on Socialism demonstrating that the socialist solution was impossible in a technical sense."

"It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. The Soviet system has long been dogged by a method of pricing that produced grotesque misallocations of effort. The difficulties were not so visible in the early days of Soviet industrialization or in the post-Second World War reconstruction period. The dams and mills and entire new cities of the nineteen-thirties astonished the world, as did the Chinese Great Leap Forward of the nineteen-fifties, which performed similar miracles from a still lower base. But those undertakings, like the building of the Pyramids or the Great Wall, depended less on economic coordination than on the political capacity for marshalling vast labor forces. Inefficiency set in when projects had to be joined into a complex whole – a process that required knowing how much things should cost. As Mises foresaw, setting prices became a hopeless problem, because the economy never stood still long enough for anyone to decide anything correctly."

"Socialists have certainly good reason to be grateful to Professor Mises, the great advocatus diaboli of their cause. For it was his powerful challenge that forced the socialists to recognise the importance of an adequate system of economic accounting to guide the allocation of resources in a socialist economy. Even more, it was chiefly due to Professor Mises' challenge that many socialists became aware of the very existence of such a problem.... [T]he merit of having caused the socialists to approach this problem systematically belongs entirely to Professor Mises. Both as an expression of recognition for the great service rendered by him and as a memento of the prime importance of sound economic accounting, a statue of Professor Mises ought to occupy an honorable place in the great hall of the Ministry of Socialisation or of the Central Planning Board of the socialist state."

"The goal of liberalism is the peaceful cooperation of all men. It aims at peace among nations too. When there is private ownership of the means of production everywhere and when laws, the tribunals and the administration treat foreigners and citizens on equal terms, it is of little importance where a country's frontiers are drawn. Nobody can derive any profit from conquest, but many can suffer losses from fighting. War no longer pays; there is no motive for aggression. The population of every territory is free to determine to which state it wishes to belong, or whether it prefers to establish a state of its own. All nations can coexist peacefully, because no nation is concerned about the size of its state."

"Mises (pronounced Mee-zis) was by far the most important figure of the Austrian School of economics. The Austrians eschewed economic calculation for a more philosophical approach to issues of finance and trade. They viewed modern theories as highly mathematical, heavily conceptual, and largely divorced from reality. For them, virtually every contemporary economist is akin to a geocentrist using increasingly complicated models to predict how celestial bodies circled the Earth. Difficult math doesn’t make a calculation true, and neither does it make its practitioner smart. This disdain for statistics can be seen in the New Right’s contempt for using numeric data as a mechanism of persuasion. It’s about the story, not the numbers."

"Mises was born in 1881 in my hometown of Lvov, in what is now Ukraine. He emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York in 1940 and became perhaps the most thoroughgoing American defender of laissez-faire capitalism. Years later Milton Friedman would recount a story about the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, held in 1947. The group was meant to bring together what Europeans would call liberal intellectuals and what Americans would describe as libertarians. As Friedman recalled, “We were discussing the distribution of income, and whether you should have progressive income taxes. Some of the people there were expressing the view that there could be a justification for it.” Furiously and famously, Mises declared, “You’re all a bunch of socialists!” and stormed out. Much like Rand with rent control, Mises felt that once income distribution is on the table, the jig is basically up. It simply becomes a matter of haggling over how much socialism there is."

"The dictatorship of the proletariat was the logical extension of Lenin’s agitprop; Fascism was more than the logical extension of liberty – it was embraced by Ludwig von Mises (1985 [1927], 42–51), the co-leader of the third generation Austrian School, [...] Mises’ political activity was consistent with his ideology: on 1 March 1934, he joined the Austro-Fascist Patriotic Front and their Werk Neues Leben social club (Hülsmann 2007, 677, n149). Mises may also have been a victim of propaganda: his justification for this tactical embrace was that fascists would protect property – the protection of which he saw as the very essence of liberty. [...] The Jewish-born Mises was lucky to escape with his life; he devoted much of the rest of it to describing his opponents as ‘Fascists’."

"The characteristic feature of militarism is not the fact that a nation has a powerful army or navy. It is the paramount role assigned to the army within the political structure. Even in peacetime the army is supreme; it is the predominant factor in political life. The subjects must obey the government as soldiers must obey their superiors. Within a militarist community there is no freedom; there are only obedience and discipline."

"Inflation is an increase in the quantity of money without a corresponding increase in the demand for money, i.e., for cash holdings."

"If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action."

"You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State."

"The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship"