1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Inequality, on Mises's reading, is not a defect for policy to correct but the very mechanism by which consumers steer production—rewarding entrepreneurs who serve them and stripping resources from those who fail. He distinguishes capitalist fortunes, built by supplying the masses with goods once beyond reach, from feudal wealth won by conquest, and argues that confiscating high incomes diverts capital from investment into consumption or state spending. Redistribution, he warns, has no principled stopping point once inequality is branded an evil: progressive taxation becomes a slope toward socialism. Invoking Henry Ford and the fate of the 1895 business structure, he presses the alternative to its edge—consumers or the state, market economy or socialism, with no third solution. The essay opens the collection's broader case against interventionism and the night-watchman state.
Inequality of wealth and incomes is the cause of the masses’ well-being, not the cause of anybody’s distress.
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.”
When the January 1990 cost-of-living index jumped 1.1 percent in a single month—an annualized rate above thirteen percent—no one panicked, and that calm is exactly what Rothbard sets out to explain. Commentators, he charges, simply subtracted the fastest-rising categories, food and energy, and christened the remainder the "core rate," turning measurement into reassurance. He traces the maneuver's lineage from Reagan-era housing exclusions to 1923 Germany, where prices measured against gold could show deflation even as the mark collapsed. The Establishment, he argues, keeps economic spin doctors as surely as political ones. Rejecting wage-push explanations, Rothbard locates the real culprit where officials least like to look: the money supply created by the federal government itself.
We consumers don’t have the privilege of paying only for “core” goods; nor, unfortunately, do we enjoy the luxury of paying in gold.
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.
The textual record on Carl Menger's politics refuses to settle: Boehm reads him rejecting Manchester laissez-faire, Streissler finds rigorous liberalism in his lectures to Crown Prince Rudolph, Mises recalls the Austrians as foes of intervention, Myrdal sees pure political detachment, and Bukharin treats the school as Marxism's fiercest antagonist. Kirzner reconciles them by separating Menger's central theoretical vision from its policy fine print. The marginal-utility revolution, on this reading, was less a technical device than a systemic picture of the economy as consumer-driven, valuations flowing upward to govern factor prices and resource use. That doctrine of consumer sovereignty made markets look like efficient servants of the public, yet it presupposed a given distribution of property, allowed that consumers might misjudge their own good, and separated ideal economic prices from error-distorted real ones, leaving ample room for intervention.
Markets are not only not seen as chaotically discoordinated, they are seen as systematic, efficient servants of the consuming public.
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.