Libertarianism For Beginners by Todd Seavey & Nathan Smith

Libertarianism For Beginners by Todd Seavey & Nathan Smith

Author:Todd Seavey & Nathan Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For Beginners LLC


Born in the Austo-Hungarian Empire in what

is now Ukraine, Mises came from a noble family of businessmen, engineers, and mathematicians. He got a law degree and lectured on economics, heavily influenced by the work of founding Austrian economist Carl Menger and the lectures of Austrian economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk. He fought in World War I and served as an economic advisor to the Austrian Chamber of Commerce and Austrian politicians of both a fascistic and social-democratic bent. He left Austria in his thirties for Switzerland, married and left Europe altogether in 1940 as the Nazis advanced across Europe, settling in the United States.

Mises received grants from the Rockefeller University and Volker Fund as well as one of the trustees of New York University, where he was a visiting professor and a great influence on Murray Rothbard and other New York libertarians, including Ayn Rand. With Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other prominent libertarians, Mises co-founded the free-market Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 in hopes of restoring the lost classical liberal social order in the wake of World War II.

Mises sought to explain all of free-market economics as a logical deduction from a few undeniable observations about reality. The first of these is the fact that “humans act,” the starting point of his 1949 masterpiece, Human Action.

Economics should not be just the accumulation of statistics or other data in the absence of an explanatory theory, he believed, but rather a science of the logically necessary consequences of human action, or praxeology.

Human Action was in a sense the positive version of the negative consequences of intervention and interference in markets that Mises described in his early work, Socialism (1922). Between these extremes, he described broader, intermediary political principles in short popularizations such as Liberalism (1927), in which he defended the classical, pre-twentieth-century conception of that philosophy (and earned undue criticism decades later for a brief, passing reference to the fledgling fascist movement as a possible counterweight to Communism).

During World War II, Mises published increasingly dire analyses of the effects of totalitarian planning, in works such as Interventionism (1941), Omnipotent Government (1944), and Bureaucracy (1944), followed after the war by Planned Chaos (1947).

In an age when most intellectuals believed socialism (in some form) was the essence of rational planning, Mises tirelessly made the case that, in the absence of the price signals created by free trade in all goods among willing buyers and sellers, “prices” and the decisions about how to set them and how to allocate goods will be meaningless, leading inevitably to shortages and other economic disruptions. This was considered a key contribution to the ongoing argument in the early twentieth century often referred to as the “socialist calculation debate.”



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