Ludwig von Mises was born in 1881, in Lemberg, Galicia (now called Lviv in Ukraine), where his father was engaged in financing and construction of Railways. But he grew up mainly in Vienna, and entered the University in 1900, graduating with a doctorate in law and Economics in 1906. Like most students, he was initially a believer in the need for government intervention in the economy; but his discovery of the book Principles of economics by Karl Menger led him to believe in the importance of free markets, the conviction that individual choices are the only solid foundation on which economics research can be built.
Official economic publications
After graduating, Mises worked for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, a semi-official body that advises the government on economic policy issues. He soon became the most prominent analyst in it – which was reinforced by the publication in 1912 of his highly influential book The Theory of money and credit.
Mises wanted to be an academic Professor, but he never got involved in that profession – he was prevented from doing so, according to him, because of his unpopular liberal views on market liberalization. It really started،
His writings on Economics, Political Science and methodology
Throughout his adult life, Mises was firmly entrenched in his adherence to anti-state beliefs. Even at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society – a group of liberal social thinkers founded by Hayek in 1947 – Mises came out during a discussion about progressive income taxes, saying: "you are only a group of Socialists!"Fritz maklub once questioned the wisdom of the gold standard, and Mises broke off relations with him for three years.
Mises probably knew the dangers of compromising with socialism from his interwar experiences in Europe. But socialist ideas were in vogue then and his uncompromising views hampered his academic career. Even his most theoretically intensive works were often punctuated by violent polemics against the intellectual drift towards the state-something that academic readers may find disturbing.
It also did not help Mises that he was writing in German, as economists ' attention was focused on English-speaking writers such as Fischer, Marchand and Keynes. Being out of the context of the scientifically recognized, the translation of his works has been delayed; some of these translations do not do justice to the accuracy of his original language. Even when he wrote in English after moving to America, he lacked fluency: his meanings were sometimes vague and he often distorted the meaning with his poor choice of words. He sometimes rushes, in the space of no more than a few pages, from highly condensed academic reasoning to the most controversial ideas against ideas that he finds urgent. And his particularly caustic speeches can turn away modern readers. With
The Austrian Chamber of Commerce until Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. But his Jewish origin and fierce anti-totalitarianism made him an exile from Austria and an embarrassment to the Swiss government: in 1940, he and his wife Margit fled to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1946.
Writing and education in America
Although his academic reputation preceded him, Mises was in his sixties when he arrived in New York, and he was struggling to find an academic job. Perhaps his relatively weak English and prickly character did not mean to him. But he lectured at New York University between 1945 and 1969, despite being only an unpaid visiting professor at the time. However, these years were full of activity. Mises attracted talented students and teachers to his seminars, as he did in Vienna. He produced books such as bureaucracy, omnipotent government, anti-capitalist mentality, theory and history, in which he exposed the shortcomings of illiberal thinking and contained important new insights on the methodology of Economic Sciences. Then in 1949, his monumental book The Human Act combined economics and individuality into an impressive whole. This book is still considered his greatest work.
In his last years, Mises was honored with pride certificates and other decorations. He died in October 1973, undisputed dean of the Austrian School of Economics. Exactly one year later, the news spread that his follower and friend Friedrich Hayek had won the Nobel Prize for the theory of the business cycle, which they pioneered together.
Systems of social organization
Mises believed that economics, if properly understood, could provide important guidelines for determining which types of economic or social organization are applicable and which are not. His 1919 book The Nation, the state and the economy is a good example of this. In it, he argues that nations, in their tireless quest to preserve their cultures, usually resist migration to them by other groups and put up protective barriers against these groups. The ultimate effect of this is that other nations are trapped in poor and densely populated areas, which encourages hatreds and pushes them to seize the area they simply "need". But it is the power of governments to erect barriers that leads to these conflicts; only the disappearance of state power will eliminate such conflicts.
Socialism is a recipe for preparing conflicts. Socialist economies must isolate themselves, otherwise migration will disrupt their precise plans. Socialist states are imperialist by nature: market economies are always superior to them; therefore, in order to preserve the myth of their superiority, they should try to convert all other states to socialism.
Mises developed these views in another great book, Socialism, in 1922. In it he raises several crucial points, but his most destructive theme is that rational economic calculation was impossible under socialism: without prices, there is no way to find out whether production goods are used cost-effectively.
His 1929 book criticism of interventionism showed that diluted socialism is no better off. Any intervention in the markets, he explains, produces unexpected and undesirable side effects. Lowering the price of milk, for example, increases the demand for milk, but decreases from