Saddened, but undaunted, Mises would spend the rest of his life championing the noble but forsaken cause of liberty and liberalism…. Editorial, retitled and with added notes and bibliography by David Hart. Editorial, retitled.
Bibliography by David M. Republished with permission of original copyright holders. Saddened, but undaunted, Mises would spend the rest of his life championing the noble but forsaken cause of liberty and liberalism. By the last decade of the Nineteenth Century, signals were clear that the beginning of the end of the liberal era was at hand. The liberating forces that had been advancing for more than two centuries were grinding to a halt. The New Imperialism, preparation for militarism, and protectionism were replacing both the principles and reality of international peace and free trade.
Neomercantilism was being reconstructed around the globe. The liberals knew that the unprecedented prosperity yielded during the heyday of liberalism depended on implementing the free trade plank of the liberal platform. As Mises never tired of pointing out, necessarily central to the free trade system is a sound monetary mechanism to facilitate the policy of free trade.
Free trade, sound money, and prosperity are mutually interdependent parts of a single policy. To pay for military build-ups and for the burdens of neocolonialization, governments around the world resorted to inflation. Governments and the bankers were once again drawn together into a Neo-Mercantile symbiosis.
Inflation, as it always has a way of doing, led to protectionism. Sound money and free trade were left hanging in the balance.
The final and decisive blow against the classical liberal order in general and against the international trade and monetary mechanism the gold standard in particular was delivered with a vengeance by the Great War. In the blink of an eye, it was all but gone. The Rights of Man, Peace, Prosperity—all these and the rest of the honored liberal agenda—lay prostrate and smoldering among the ghastly ruins on the battlefields of Europe.
Unfortunately, nearly all of Twentieth-Century history flows directly from this monumental misfortune. The Versailles treaty, the Bolshevik revolution, run-away inflation, the rise of fascism, the Great Depression, exchange controls, autarkic trading blocs, the destruction of international trade and its monetary mechanism the gold standard , the Second World War, the Cold War—this entire brood of evils emanated from World War I.
At every turn, statism; and at every turn Mises was there to debunk and refute each statist measure and more particularly the collectivist philosophy that lay behind the interminable measure-after-measure of statist intervention. Even before the Great War, Mises had achieved a significant measure of international acclaim with the publication of his Theory of Money and Credit Mises demonstrated that there is no realm of so-called macroeconomics separate from micro theory, one which requires a separate policy.
The policy in all areas of economics, as Mises showed, must be laissez faire across the board and with no exceptions. This means a total separation of public finance from the banking industry. It means a policy of free banking. Ludwig von. Mises was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of Economics throughout most of the twentieth century.
He earned his doctorate in law and economics from the University of Vienna in From to , he was an economist for the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. From to , he was a visiting professor at New York University.
Bettina Bien Greavesis a former resident scholar, trustee, and longtime staff member of the Foundation for Economic Education. Shehas written and lectured extensively on topics of free market economics. Pages Home. Introduction In the pursuit of science little can be said to be of greater importance than the epistemology employed. In this regard the epistemology of the Austrian School of economic thought has been roundly criticized and rejected by mainstream economists.
With Smith's introduction of fallibilism into Mises's system, some of the distance between it and Karl Popper's concept of conjectural knowledge was reduced. This reconciliation has been visible in a number of efforts that attempt to bring Mises's approach into the methodological housing of Popper and other philosophers of science, notably Imre Lakatos.
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