Bureaucracy contrasts the two forms of economic management―that of a free-market economy and that of a bureaucracy. In the market economy entrepreneurs are driven to serve consumers by their desire to earn profits and to avoid losses. In a bureaucracy, the managers must comply with orders issued by the legislative body under which they operate; they may not spend without authorization, and they may not deviate from the path prescribed by law. Ludwig von Mises here lucidly demonstrates how the efficiencies of private ownership and control of public good production ultimately trump the guesswork of publicly administered “planning” through codes and “officialdom.” Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century. Bettina Bien Greaves is a former resident scholar and trustee of the Foundation for Economic Education and was a senior staff member at FEE from 1951 to 1999.

Written toward the end of Mises's life, his last monograph, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, returned to science, economics as a science based on human action. Mises believed that, since the publication of Human Action, economists and scientists alike had misinterpreted the idea of economics as a science by deeming it epistemological positivism -- that they believed that the "science" basis was still more rooted in philosophy than in actual science. In this volume, Mises argued that economics is a science because human action is a natural order of life and that it is the actions of humans that determine markets and capital decisions. Since Mises believed these links could be proven scientifically, he concluded that economics, with its basis on that human action, is indeed a science in its own right and not an ideology or a metaphysical doctrine. What has been described as his most passionate work, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science brings together all of the themes from Mises's previous work.

This book has grown, from thirteen essays to seventeen essays. It is now the largest ever. There are now four additional essays of special merit. Also, for the first time, an analytical and descriptive essay has been added, "The Essential Von Mises," by a former student, Murray N. Rothbard, which is extraordinarily helpful. How do you introduce Mises into your thinking? Read these essays, and Rothbard's superior analysis, and you will be a better-informed person. Socrates considered ethics to be the queen of all the sciences; if so, economics is the bridegroom. Nobody can afford to be ignorant of economics, unless he is indifferent about having knowledge in the second most important of the social sciences.

After Ludwig von Mises's death in 1973, his wife, Margit von Mises, went through his unpublished and out-of-print essays and selected twenty-one of the essays for publication. The result was Money, Method, and the Market Process, published in 1990 by Kluwer Academic Publishers and the Ludwig von Mises Institute and reissued now by Liberty Fund. In his introduction to the book, Richard Ebeling describes it as a "convenient composite of Misesian economics.'" He says that the essays here touch on "almost every aspect of economic and social theory that Mises considered of paramount importance. The essays were written over a period of forty years, from the 1930s to the 1960s, so they serve as a wide sampling of Mises's thought on a wide range of subjects, and they are arranged thematically. The three essays in the first section, on "Method," discuss the differences between the social and natural sciences and include some of Mises's thoughts on the science of human action. The essays in the next section, on "Money," discuss inflation and money in economic exchange, and they include Mises's analysis of why stabilizing the price level will not necessarily stabilize economic activity. This leads readers to the section on "Trade," where Mises warns of the danger of international conflict in a world without free trade. There are seven essays on "Comparative Economic Systems," and they include detailed studies on capitalism versus socialism, the cooperative movement, the Russian Reform Movement, and equality and inequality. Under the heading of "Ideas," the final two essays are "The Role of Doctrines in Human History" and the well-known piece called "The Idea of Liberty Is Western". --

Text: English, German (translation)

Text: English, German (translation)