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Ludwig von Mises, the author of such classics as Socialism and Human Action, is universally acknowledged as one of the most important classical liberals and economists of the twentieth century. In 1934, he left his native Austria in fear of the Nazis who seized all his papers in 1938 in Vienna and, Mises thought, destroyed them.

But the papers were not destroyed. In 1996, Richard Ebeling and his wife Anna discovered the papers in an archive in Moscow. This second volume in the resulting Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises series from Liberty Fund represents a treasure trove of important essays by the great free market economist.

“It is almost universally asserted that the severe economic crisis under which the world presently is suffering has provided proof of the impossibility of retaining the capitalist system. Capitalism, it is thought, has failed; and its place must be taken by a better system, which clearly can be none other than socialism.
That the currently dominant system has failed can hardly be contested. But it is another question whether the system that has failed was the capitalist system or whether, in fact, it is not anticapitalist policy – interventionism, and national and municipal socialism – that is to blame for the catastrophe.”

Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (1881-1973) was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian School of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’ writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science which Mises called “praxeology”. He taught at the University of Vienna and later at New York University. Mises wrote many works on two related economic themes: 1. monetary economics, inflation, and the role of government, and 2. the differences between government-controlled economies and free trade. His influential work on economic freedoms, their causes and consequences, brought him to highlight the interrelationships between economic and non-economic freedoms in societies, and the appropriate role for government.