The archive.

Rename a cause as its effect, and blame for it dissolves: this, Mises charges, is the semantic trick by which governments escape responsibility for inflation. Properly understood, inflation is not the rise in prices but the state's expansion of money and bank credit—here to finance rearmament—which adds government demand to undiminished civilian demand and drives prices upward. Officials then claim to fight inflation while sustaining its cause, attacking only the visible symptom through price control. But ceilings cannot repeal scarcity: fixed below market-clearing levels, they force high-cost producers out and empty the shelves, as American experience under the Office of Price Administration showed. The one remedy, he insists, is to stop creating money for the Treasury; the cost of spending must fall somewhere, and inflation merely hides who pays.

This is a classical case of the thief crying “catch the thief.”

Reprinted from a 1951 newspaper column, this brief polemic reads the postwar boom as an artificial episode conjured by paper money, bank credit, cheap interest, and deficit finance rather than as genuine prosperity. Mises presses the Austrian distinction between real capital accumulation and its monetary substitutes: rising prices prove not new wealth but falsified entrepreneurial calculation, so every credit-driven boom carries its own reversal. His deeper warning is ideological. When the inevitable slump arrives, a public that blames capitalism instead of inflationary public finance—the New Deal, the Fair Deal—will convert the failure of intervention into an argument for central planning. Avoiding depressions therefore means refusing artificial booms beforehand, though Mises doubts that politicians, who reap present popularity and leave the crash to their successors, will ever exercise such restraint.

Worse than the crisis itself could prove the psychological and ideological consequences of an erroneous interpretation of its causes.

The era of financing government by taxing wealthy minorities has ended, Mises told a 1951 conference on the economics of mobilization; henceforth the masses must foot the bill. His target is the comforting belief that inflation offers a painless alternative to taxation. It works, he shows, only on public ignorance: while people expect prices to fall they hold cash, but once they grasp that depreciation is deliberate they rush to buy—the flight into real values that wrecks the currency. War means diverting real goods from civilian to military use, a cost no printing press can conjure away; the honest methods are taxation and genuine borrowing from savings. Inflation, by hiding costs and shifting popular anger onto merchants and 'profiteers,' is at bottom an antidemocratic evasion, not democratic generosity.

At the breakfast table of every citizen in wartime sits an invisible guest, as it were, a GI who shares his meal.

Against the socialist promise that collective ownership will deliver both abundance and perfect freedom, this 1960 review of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty rebuilds the liberal meaning of liberty from the ground up. Freedom, Mises insists, is not escape from scarcity or natural necessity but a social relation: voluntary contractual cooperation set against authoritarian command, in which one will subordinates all others and moral agency decays into obedience. Crediting Hayek's argument that control of the means is control of every end, he concludes that economic direction cannot be quarantined from the rest of life. His sharpest turn is against Hayek himself—the welfare state, Mises argues, is not a stable middle way but a gradual method for transforming the market economy step by step into socialism, ending, like outright nationalization, in the authoritarian state.

Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.

The fork, soap, the automobile, nylon stockings, television, frozen foods: each entered the world as an elite extravagance before becoming an ordinary necessity, and that compression is capitalism's real social achievement. Drawing on Gabriel Tarde's observation that innovations descend from the wealthy few to the many, Mises argues that large-scale enterprise, far from serving a closed aristocracy, requires mass markets and so multiplies consumers, steadily shortening—and finally almost abolishing—the lag between invention and common use. Capitalism, in his definition, is production at scale aimed not at a privileged few but at ordinary buyers. The essay's polemical target is the Marxist doctrine of increasing immiseration: the diffusion of once-exclusive goods is offered as empirical refutation, the old gulf between mobility and immobility having narrowed into the difference between first-class and coach.

Capitalism is essentially mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses.

Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State gives Mises the occasion for both an endorsement and an assault. He greets the treatise as a comprehensive restoration of economics as a science of human action—praxeology—that reconstructs prices, wages, profit, and loss from purposeful choice rather than collecting isolated policy doctrines. Much of the review champions Rothbard's attack on mathematical economics: equilibrium is a timeless hypothetical that describes no actual process, and numerical data are historical records, not measurable constants. On unemployment, Mises applauds the recovery of the wage rate as the missing price. He registers one reservation, over Rothbard's philosophy of law and punishment, but the verdict holds: an epochal contribution to praxeology, and a reminder that the organization of the economy is every citizen's concern rather than a specialist's preserve.

The issues of society's economic organization are every citizen's business.

Interviewed by Percy Greaves in 1969, amid dollar weakness and gold anxiety in the last years of Bretton Woods, Mises reduces the era's monetary troubles to a single fiscal evasion. Inflation, he insists, is not a mysterious rise of prices but a policy of creating money by fiat to spend beyond taxes and honest borrowing; because new money enters through particular hands, it redistributes purchasing power toward first receivers and strips it from savers, pensioners, and endowed institutions. He overturns the folk image of inflation as the poor debtor's friend—ordinary households are now the creditors, through deposits, bonds, and insurance—and rebuts the balance-of-payments alibi that blames importers and tourists. Sound money, he concludes, is inseparable from limited government, and the gold standard's merit is that officials cannot manufacture it to cover their deficits.

The gold standard did not fail. The governments sabotaged it and still go on sabotaging it.

Institutions can keep their legal form intact while their social meaning quietly reverses—and reforms that once made sense become, in Mises's word, atavistic. Written for a 1966 Festschrift honoring Jacques Rueff, the essay pursues the claim through two cases. Egalitarian land redistribution answered a feudal order where property tracked caste, conquest, and privilege; under the market it is incoherent, since consumers decide anew each day who shall own the factors of production and owners hold their land only by serving buyers efficiently. Favoritism toward debtors once meant relieving the poor against wealthy lenders, but capitalism has flipped the class map: ordinary people are the creditors, through savings and pensions, while the rich borrow. Gottfried Feder's Nazi slogan against interest slavery becomes Mises's emblem of the confusion, answered by the gold standard's protection of the common man's savings.

The owners are mandates of the consumers as it were, bound to employ their property as if it were entrusted to them by the people.

Exchange crises, draining reserves, balance-of-payments alarms: the international monetary problem, Mises contends, is a domestic policy problem wearing a foreign mask. Governments inflate and cheapen credit at home while pledging fixed exchange parities abroad, then blame tourists, importers, and speculators for the contradiction they created. Reasserting the purchasing-power-parity theory against the balance-of-payments doctrine, he argues that currencies exchange according to what they buy, so a state that expands its money supply must watch its currency's external value fall; what the press calls an attack is only the market correcting an official falsification. He distinguishes inflation, the increase of money beyond demand, from inflationism, its deliberate fiscal use, and dismisses reserve pooling and new international facilities as schemes to spread one country's inflation to others. An appendix shows how anticipated depreciation corrupts interest rates and business accounting alike.

Inflationism is not a variety of economic policies. It is an instrument of destruction; if not stopped very soon, it destroys the market entirely.

Keynesianism as doctrine may be dead, but its slogans still cloud economic understanding—so runs the argument of this 1964 Freeman review of W. H. Hutt's Keynesianism—Retrospect and Prospect. The General Theory succeeded, in Mises's reading, not by advancing theory but by lending scientific respectability to policies governments already wanted: deficit finance, currency devaluation, price intervention, and the coercive privileges of labor unions, the whole machinery of the New Deal. Hutt's value lies in clearing the air, restating the elementary price theory that Keynesian vocabulary had buried. For Mises the decisive charge is that Keynes and his followers simply do not grasp what prices are or how they arise; treating them as administrative quantities to be set by authority replaces voluntary coordination with force and conceals the resulting dislocations beneath a fog of terminology.

The main failure of Keynes and all his disciples and admirers is to be seen in the fact that they simply do not know what prices are, how they originate, and what they bring about.

Animosity against business runs through the policies of every not-quite-socialist nation, and this 1961 Mont Pelerin Society paper sets out to expose it as intellectually confused. Firms grow large, Mises argues, not by decree but by serving mass demand better than rivals under the discipline of profit and loss; the moral center of the market is therefore consumer sovereignty, not the entrepreneur's dignity. He punctures the sentimental war between plucky small business and predatory bigness—small firms are typically interwoven with large-scale production—and warns that measures to shield small producers and family farms turn their beneficiaries into wards of the administration. Tracing nationalization's retreat into planning, from wartime Zwangswirtschaft to the soziale Marktwirtschaft, he closes on a democratic paradox: as consumers people build great enterprises, yet as voters they punish them.

The "common man" enjoys in the capitalistic countries amenities of which the richest people of ages gone by did not even dream.

The gravest danger to American freedom, this 1960 essay warns, is neither military conquest nor open revolution but the interventionist policies embraced by mainstream parties that denounce communism while cherishing planning. Mises collapses the distinction between socialism, communism, and planning—each substitutes one government plan for the plans of individual citizens—and insists economic control cannot be walled off from press, employment, and assembly. Inflation is planning's most insidious ally: the expansion of money and money substitutes creates no wealth, only a hidden redistribution toward first receivers. Its subtlest victim is the thrifty householder, whom capitalism had deproletarianized into a creditor through savings, insurance, and pensions, and whom inflation reproletarianizes by dissolving those very claims. Sound money thus becomes a constitutional safeguard—and, Mises argues, a frontline defense against the appeal of communism.

If somebody says he is opposed to communism, but cherishes socialism, he is no more consistent or logical than a man who declares that he is opposed to murder but cherishes assassination.