AustriaWho was Ludwig von Mises?
Ludwig von Mises was born in 1881 in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine), and studied law and government at the University of Vienna. For about 25 years he worked at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce while running an influential private seminar, where Friedrich Hayek was among his students. He moved to Geneva in 1934 and to New York in 1940, becoming a United States citizen in 1946 and teaching at New York University for over two decades. His major works include The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), Socialism (1922), Liberalism (1927) and Human Action (1949). He died in New York in 1973.
Political views
Argued that rational economic calculation is impossible under socialism because there are no market prices for comparing uses of capital goods.
Source: mises.orgHeld that government intervention in markets tends to produce results its supporters did not want, leaving laissez-faire capitalism as the workable choice.
Source: mises.orgSummarized the program of classical liberalism as resting on private property, which he treated as the foundation of liberty and peace.
Source: mises.orgSupported political decentralization and the right of self-determination, which the Mises Institute presents as his preferred path to peace.
Source: mises.orgDeveloped a theory of the business cycle in which credit expansion by banks distorts investment and leads to booms followed by busts.
Source: mises.orgConcluded that unrestricted laissez-faire was the only viable economic policy and denounced tariffs and immigration restrictions.
Source: mises.org
Legacy
Mises shaped the Austrian school and the later libertarian movement, influencing Hayek, Murray Rothbard and others; the Ludwig von Mises Institute was founded in his name in 1982. Admirers see his argument about economic calculation as vindicated by the problems of planned economies. Critics, including many mainstream economists, reject his praxeology, the view that economics is an a priori science not tested by statistics, and argue that his opposition to nearly all intervention ignores market failures and the record of mixed economies.
In their words
The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property