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Listen to  the  Audio Mises Wire  version  of this article. [Editor’s note: this essay was found among Bettina Bien Greaves’s files. A note in her handwriting indicates that it was written in 1944 and that Mises used it in his 1959 seminar. In this short essay, Mises in his characteristically lucid and forceful manner goes over the basics of

[This is the fourth lecture from Mises’s Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow .] If the supply of caviar were as plentiful as the supply of potatoes, the price of caviar—that is, the exchange ratio between caviar and money or caviar and other commodities—would change considerably. In that case, one could obtain caviar at a much smaller

Inflationism is that policy which by increasing the quantity of money or credit seeks to raise money prices and money wages or seeks to counteract a decline of money prices and money wages which threatens as the result of an increase in the supply of consumers’ goods. In order to understand the economic significance of inflationism we have to

The complete confiscation of all private property is tantamount to the introduction of socialism. Therefore we do not have to deal with it in an analysis of the problems of interventionism. We are concerned here only with the partial confiscation of property. Such confiscation is today attempted primarily by taxation. The ideological motivations

[ A Selection from Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition .] Equality Nowhere is the difference between the reasoning of the older liberalism and that of neoliberalism clearer and easier to demonstrate than in their treatment of the problem of equality. The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the

[A selection from Nation, State, and Economy . Editor’s note: When Mises refers to “liberals” or “liberalism” he means the ideology of laissez-faire , sometimes now called “classical liberalism.”] Marxism sees the coming of socialism as an inescapable necessity. Even if one were willing to grant the correctness of this opinion, one still would by

Restrictive measures are those measures undertaken by the authority which directly and primarily are intended to divert production, in the widest meaning of the word, including commerce and transportation, from the ways which it would take in the unhampered economy. Each interference diverts production from the channels prescribed by the market.

[This essay originally appeared in Christian Economics , March 4, 1958. It was reprinted as chapter 10 of Planning for Freedom .] Our economic system — the market economy or capitalism — is a system of consumers’ supremacy. The customer is sovereign; he is, says a popular slogan, “always right.” Businessmen are under the necessity of turning out

[ This article is excerpted from Human Action (1949), chapter 37, “The Nondescript Character of Economics.” ] The Singularity of Economics What assigns economics its peculiar and unique position in the orbit both of pure knowledge and of the practical utilization of knowledge is the fact that its particular theorems are not open to any

[A selection from Profit and Loss .] The consumers by their buying and abstention from buying elect the entrepreneurs in a daily repeated plebiscite as it were. They determine who should own and who not, and how much each owner should own. As is the case with all acts of choosing a person—choosing holders of public office, employees, friends, or a