3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Who receives newly created money first—and who pays for it later? This question gives Mises’s account of inflation its distributive and political edge. Compiled and edited by Bettina Bien Greaves from his 1960s lectures, this 2010 synthesis presents monetary expansion not simply as a rise in prices but as a transfer of purchasing power that can erode savings and evade restraints on public spending. Mises challenges the familiar picture of rich creditors and poor debtors: pensions, insurance policies, and bank deposits make ordinary households creditors too. His defence of gold rests chiefly on its resistance to cheap political multiplication, not on a promise of perfect stability. The informal examples make tangible his central distinction between creating money and producing the goods that money buys.
The problem is not to increase the quantity of money. The problem is to increase the quantity of those things which can be bought with money.
An economist’s lasting contribution need not lie in solutions that survive criticism. In this brief review of Edgeworth’s Papers relating to Political Economy, Ludwig von Mises locates much of Edgeworth’s value in his ability to expose weaknesses in others’ arguments and formulate difficult problems. His appreciation is discriminating: he questions the gains from mathematical reformulation and judges substantial portions of the collection superseded, while insisting that later obsolescence does not cancel original achievement. The review offers a compact view of Mises as a reader of another economist—skeptical of analytical effort without explanatory returns, attentive to the historical claims of outdated work, and appreciative of Edgeworth’s plea against mutual disparagement between theoretical and historical inquiry.
Written from New York in November 1961 to thank Alfred Müller-Armack for birthday wishes, this short letter turns quickly to a correction Mises wanted on record: he had been misunderstood as rejecting all political compromise. Theory and program, he insists, must be built consistently and without contradiction, yet the politician who cannot move the majority to adopt them must settle for whatever the given circumstances make attainable. The concession costs him nothing doctrinally—he restates his standing verdict that middle-of-the-road interventionism, in every variety, necessarily ends in full socialism. Writing as a European rather than American liberal, he closes by praising Müller-Armack and Ludwig Erhard for the postwar German recovery, a liberal achievement he can admire without endorsing its every interventionist remnant.
In der praktischen Politik kann man nur selten das Vollkommene erreichen. Man muss sich in der Regel damit begnügen, das kleinere Übel zu wählen.
English translation: “In practical politics one can only rarely attain the perfect. As a rule one must be content to choose the lesser evil.”
Explaining why banking systems differ is not the same as deciding which is preferable. This distinction drives Ludwig von Mises’s short review of Walter Huth’s comparison of German and French large banks. While crediting Huth’s diligence, Mises finds that his preference for combining banking functions turns the inquiry toward a defence of the German system. Mises instead locates the stronger explanation for divergent banking development in the structures of industry and commerce, rather than in banking techniques alone. The review offers a compact example of his critical method: acknowledging useful research while asking whether its evidence explains institutional differences or merely ranks their merits.