Nice article in Investor’s Business Daily on Mises, which quotes extensively from TLS blogger Jeff Tucker and Austrians Bettina Bien Greaves and Mark Thornton:
Let Free Markets Work, Said Ludwig Von Mises
By PETER BENESH, FOR INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY Posted 12/13/2011 01:47 PM ET
![Ludwig von Mises was born in Ukraine, studied in Vienna, fought in World War I, and in 1940 landed in America, where he lectured and wrote books.]()
Ludwig von Mises was born in Ukraine, studied in Vienna, fought in World War I, and in 1940 landed in America, where he lectured and wrote books.
View Enlarged ImageIf he were around today to see the economic mess in the U.S. and Europe, Ludwig von Mises would be entitled to a big, fat “I told you so.”
Mises held that whenever government tinkers with the economy, especially the money supply, it screws things up.
Natural market forces do a better job of ironing out inflation, ending a recession and boosting employment, he said and wrote.
Though he lived to age 92, from his birth in 1881 in what is now Ukraine to his death in 1973 in New York City, Mises never drew the plaudits he deserved, says Jeffrey Tucker, executive editor of Laissez Faire Books, a libertarian publisher and bookseller owned by financial forecasting firm Agora Financial.
“Mises deserves every bit as much recognition as his contemporary, Albert Einstein,” Tucker told IBD.
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The problem FDR faced in 1938 was not all that different from that faced by President Obama and the Congress today. The bad economic times stretch on and on, and there is open talk of high unemployment as far as the eye can see. After years of claiming to see “green shoots,” officials are downplaying the chance of substantial economic recovery.
And it’s not just in the U.S.; the problem exist in Europe too, where there is a widespread belief that the European Union, as symbolized by Euro, cannot last. The OECD just predicted a double dip recession pending in the UK.
At the midpoint of Roosevelt’s second term in office, a profound fear gripped the White House that there was no real answer to the depression that seemed to continue on and on. Every respite was followed by yet another plunge in productivity, and clearly unemployment would not improve. Unemployment was 18%, which was higher than two years earlier. (Note that the broadest measure of U.S. employment today is 17+%.)
It is a documented fact that his advisers were the first to draw his attention to the possibility of stoking international problems involving the far East. Japan was the target and a series of embargoes, demands, sanctions, and diplomatic moves reinforced that the point of inspiring a massive movement in the U.S. to push for peace.
Responsible writers at the time drew attention to the plot and speculated about what was really going on. The history of the journalism of this entire period came to be buried in the ash heap of history following the Second World War. But it remains a fact that historians cannot and do not deny: FDR saw advantages in war and dearly wanted the U.S. involved – and that is true regardless of whether you believe that Pearl Harbor constituted his “back door to the war.” [Keep reading…]
I am pretty sure that, had I taken economics in school, I would never have developed an interest in it.
One of my hobbies is collecting economics textbooks. They are not uniformly bad — I have gained insights from those by Alchian and Allen, David D. Friedman, Gwartney and Stroup, and a few others — but they are not as good as the old “Principles”-style texts from days of yore. You know, general theory books covering a lot of ground for a wide audience including amateurs, written (in the best cases) in readable English (or other common tongue) and not littered with Q&As and “work problems” and “call-out” boxes of biographies of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and the ever-present Keynes. The best of the old-fashioned treatises, such as by F.W. Taussig, and especially the “anachronistic” efforts by Ludwig von Mises (Human Action) and Murray Rothbard (Man, Economy and State), outshine all econ texts used in colleges today.
Part of the problem is that the textbook industry is a mostly corrupt adjunct to the university system, the main idea being to milk as much money as possible from students. The often-annual revisions in textbooks are usually trivial . . . but quite necessary for the planned obsolescence of the media, allowing universities to renege on buy-backs, thus keeping multi-hundred dollar purchases coming into their revenue streams. Change a few pictures, charge $300+.
This perverse industry has arisen, in part, in response to the near-unlimited demand stemming from subsidized tuitions and student loans. [Keep reading…]
