Foreword by Margit von Mises

My husband wrote the essays in this book in the early 1920s, more than fifty years ago. They were collected and published as an anthology in 1929 by Gustav Fischer, for­merly in Jena, now in Stuttgart, under the title Kritik des In­terventionismus. Although these articles deal with the eco­nomic problems of that day, the same problems are still with us, perhaps in an even more serious and menacing way than ever.

The book has recently been republished in Germany by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft in Darmstadt, with a preface by my husband’s friend and former student, the il­lustrious Professor F.A. von Hayek, 1974 Nobel laureate in economics. The new German edition includes the essay “The Nationalization of Credit?” which also appears in this translation.

I am very happy that this book is now being made avail­able in English. I am no economist, but I have gone over the German and English texts of these essays, and I congratulate Professor Hans F. Sennholz, whom I asked to do the transla­tion, for his brilliant work. He has done a remarkable job of transposing the lengthy, complicated sentences—so typical of the German language of the 1920s—into fluent and ele­gant English. I am proud to see my husband’s work pre­sented in this form to a new audience, and I hope it will be read widely.

Margit von Mises