As the chief economic adviser to the Austrian government in the 1920s, Mises was, with the help of Chancellor Ignaz Seipel, able to slow down Austrian inflation and he developed his own 'private seminar' which attracted the outstanding young economists, social scientists, and philosophers throughout Europe. Holding these views, and hewing to truth indomitably in the face of a century increasingly devoted to statism and collectivism, Mises became famous for his ' intransigence' in insisting on a non-inflationary gold standard and on laissez-faire.Įffectively barred from any paid university post in Austria and later in the United States, Mises pursued his course gallantly.

Even though his economic analysis itself was 'value-free' - in the sense of being irrelevant to values held by economists - Mises concluded that the only viable economic policy for the human race was a policy of unrestricted laissez-faire, of free markets and the unhampered exercise of the right of private property, with government strictly limited to the defense of person and property within its territorial area.įor Mises was able to demonstrate (a) that the expansion of free markets, the division of labor, and private capital investment is the only possible path to the prosperity and flourishing of the human race (b) that socialism would be disastrous for a modern economy because the absence of private ownership of land and capital goods prevents any sort of rational pricing, or estimate of costs, and (c) that government intervention, in addition to hampering and crippling the market, would prove counter-productive and cumulative, leading inevitably to socialism unless the entire tissue of interventions was repealed. In the course of a long and highly productive life, he developed an integrated, deductive science of economics based on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act purposively to achieve desired goals.

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (29 September 1881–10 October 1973) was one of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century.

Marxism Unmasked by Ludwig von Mises