Brian Doherty
Ludwig von Mises, a foundational figure of modern libertarianism, was also for decades a hero of the American right. In George H. Nash’s magisterial 1976 history The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, the very first chapter stars the Austrian economist and his students and associates, saying that “it would be difficult to exaggerate the contributions of…Ludwig von Mises to the intellectual rehabilitation of individualism in America.”
Mises’ disciple Murray Rothbard complained that conservatives’ adoption of Mises occluded the more radical portions of the economist’s thinking: elements that were anti-state, pro-peace, pro-immigration, even critical of the Christian tradition. In a 1981 essay in The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Rothbard griped that too many of Mises’ right-wing fans “have unwittingly distorted [his views] and made them seem at one with the modern conservative movement in the United States,” as though Mises were “a sort of National Review intellectual.”
Figures around National Review did admire Mises. In his introduction to National Review founder William F. Buckley’s first blockbuster book—1951’s God and Man at Yale, an attack on what Buckley saw as a leftist thrust to Ivy League education—the conservative journalist John Chamberlain named Mises as one of the social thinkers shamefully excluded from the typical Yale curriculum.
Yes, some conservative mandarins mistrusted Mises, fretting that his rationalistic, utilitarian focus on economic liberties failed to stress the importance of, as Russell Kirk put it, “supernatural and traditional sanctions.” But a Misesian take on the benefits of private property and minimal economic interference was one of the three legs of the American intellectual right from the rise of Buckley’s magazine to at least the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (the other two being Christian traditionalism and militant anti-communism). Mises’ intellectual dominance was rooted in his masterfully detailed defenses of 19th-century classical liberalism and free market economics, and also in his influence on other libertarian intellectual giants, such as Rothbard, F.A. Hayek, and Ayn Rand.
Among the most damaging changes Trumpism has wrought on conservatism has been the rejection of core elements of Mises’ thought—the parts that undermined the idea that a “national interest” should supersede individual choice and freedom in markets.
Mises was an ardent free trader. President Donald Trump promotes autarchy and calls himself “Tariff Man.”
Mises was a devoted anti-inflationist, a promoter of hard currencies that government could not create and manipulate at will. Though Trump has given lip service to private cryptocurrency as part of his larger anti-establishment coalition, he also demanded in his first term that the Federal Reserve expand the money supply to goose the economy and give him a short-term political benefit.
In his 1944 book Omnipotent Government, Mises condemned forceful territorial expansion as one of the causes of Europe’s terrible 20th century wars. Since the election, Trump has publicly mulled territorial seizures around the globe.
Trump ardently supports a restrictionist immigration policy. Mises believed the free flow of people, goods, and capital were linchpins of the ideal international system.
Trump favors industrial policy, in which government planners intervene to assist selected domestic industries. Mises understood that would lower, not raise, overall prosperity.
And when Trump’s interventionist policies fail, that will mean more danger—for as Mises pointed out, failed government interventions often lead to still more intervention. Bureaucrats stubbornly continue to try to achieve their desired results through more interventions that also fail, spinning increasingly complex webs of ineffective controls. That dynamic made Mises deny the possibility of a viable “third way” between free markets and socialism. Once you start down the socialist road, he wrote, you tend to go further and further from freedom.
The Core Failure of Socialism—and of Industrial Policy
Mises was the core 20th century advocate of what is known as the Austrian school of economics. That tradition began with Carl Menger’s 1871 book Principles of Economics, which argued that the desires and valuations of individual consumers explain the formation of market prices. This idea has a natural appeal to libertarian-minded people, as it implies that the best results arise from allowing the free play of consumer desires to shape what producers produce, what things cost, and what overall shape the economy should take.
Mises was born September 29, 1881, in the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg. He received a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna in 1906. His interest in economics began when he read Menger’s Principles, which turned him toward classical liberalism. Mises worked with the Austrian chamber of commerce and lectured at the University of Vienna (not as a salaried employee, but paid directly by his students). During World War I, he served for three years as an artillery captain at the front. And in 1922, he published a magisterial work that expanded beyond economics to political philosophy and social sciences.
In the 1920s, after Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, most Western intellectuals saw socialism as a great idea that would likely sweep the globe. Mises’s book—Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis—explained why that philosophy was destructive to a happy and rich civilization. Hayek, another libertarian Austrian economist, was working for Mises at the chamber of commerce when Socialism came out. He later wrote, “To none of us young men who read the book when it appeared the world was ever the same again.”
Socialism’s most lasting contribution was Mises’ demonstration that socialism in a dynamic industrial economy could never replace a price system’s ability to match producers’ decisions with consumers’ desires. The argument over this proposition—which went back and forth for many years—became known as the “socialist calculation debate.”
What free markets did that the socialists didn’t understand, Mises explained, was reduce comparisons between incommensurable objects to a common denominator: a price. Without that common denominator, it would be impossible to make rational and efficient decisions about what to produce and in what quantities to meet demonstrable human needs. For instance: What if you possess a warehouse full of steel, but need food to eat, and wish to exchange it in the manner that would benefit you the most, commensurate with your trading partner’s desires? In a market economy, prices tell you what everything is worth in relation to everything else. If steel sells for $120 a pound, and apples for $3 a pound, you know a pound of steel is worth 40 times more than a pound of apples.
With private property and people’s ability to keep what they earn by buying and selling, market prices are likely as close as possible at any moment to how people actually value things. Why? Because “wrong” prices create entrepreneurial opportunities to raise or lower them until they do reflect people’s actual desires. This continuous market process never results in the modern economist’s perfect model of an equilibrium where trading becomes irrelevant. Thus, the combination of prices and private property comes as close as any social process could to reflecting true social desires about what should be made and what it should cost.
Under socialism in the sense that Mises used the term, one set of government planners owns everything and makes allocation decisions without market prices. In that situation, they’ll come nowhere near reflecting people’s actual desires. The prevalence of shortages and waste in the Soviet Union helped convince many economists that Mises was correct, though few thought so when he first published his arguments. As the USSR collapsed, the popular economics journalist Robert Heilbroner—no fan of Mises—declared in The New Yorker the new conventional wisdom: “It turns out, of course, that Mises was right.”
Free market prices spread information about everyone’s subjective valuations of what they want and what they are willing to pay for it. In doing so, they depend, as Hayek especially emphasized, on individuals’ unique personal awareness of specific local circumstances that no central planner could ever know, except through the very market prices the planners think they can either eliminate or invent. This makes any version of the sort of “pro-American” industrial policy Trump promotes ultimately nothing more than using political force to push privileged groups’ interests at the expense of every other American worker or consumer.
A Liberalism of Peace, Democracy, Private Property, Free Markets, and Tolerance
After Socialism, Mises wrote Liberalism in the Classical Tradition (1927), a brilliant explanation of his social philosophy. Mises’s liberalism is materialistic; “it has nothing else in view than the advancement of [man’s] outward, material welfare.” It is capitalistic, but it recognizes that a truly liberal capitalist system has as its engine not capitalists’ whims but consumers’ desires. It is democratic, but only pragmatically so; democracy largely ensures the peaceful turnover of state power. It is utilitarian; Mises advocates economic and personal liberty not from a metaphysical belief in rights but because liberalism delivers the greatest wealth and abundance.
Mises’ liberalism requires peace for its fullest flowering: When everyone can benefit from everyone else’s ideas and productivity through universal free trade, we are more likely to avoid the demands for colonialism and lebensraum that triggered the 20th century’s hideous wars. Mises’ liberalism is also a doctrine of maximal tolerance: “Liberalism proclaims tolerance for every religious faith and every metaphysical belief, not out of indifference for these ‘higher’ things, but from the conviction that the assurance of peace within society must take precedence over everything.”
Mises’ liberalism is rooted in private property: If property is protected by law, he argued, the other aspects of his liberal vision will likely result. Mises saw his worldview as a continuation of the liberal philosophy of the 19th century, which had been eclipsed in the 20th by bloody statist doctrines such as socialism and nationalism.
Mises’ 1933 book Epistemological Problems of Economics explained the connection between economics as he understood it and libertarianism. Before the development of economics, he wrote, “it had been believed that no bounds other than those drawn by the laws of nature circumscribed the path of acting man. It was not known that there is still something more that sets a limit to political power beyond which it cannot go.… In the social realm too there is something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success.”
Thus, government must remain humble in its goals in the face of economic reality and realize that most attempts to shape the economy through intervention are bound to fail, even by the standards of those who advocated the interventions. For example, those who institute price controls want goods to be abundant and cheap; but such controls inevitably make the goods more scarce and expensive as people refuse to sell at losses or for profits lower than they prefer.
Mises in America
Mises fled Austria for Switzerland as the Nazis took over. With the situation in Europe getting grimmer, in 1940 he and his wife Margit began the difficult process of escaping to the United States. The liberal cause seemed doomed as Europe was riven by fascism and destruction.
Finding an academic berth in America commensurate with his high reputation in Europe proved difficult, but Mises found friends here who recognized his importance and helped him. Most significant was the economics journalist and New York Times editorialist Henry Hazlitt, who was already an enormous fan. In his Times review of Socialism, Hazlitt had called the book “an economic classic in our time.” When he first spoke to Mises on the phone, it felt, he said, as if he had picked up the phone and heard, “This is John Stuart Mill speaking.”
Hazlitt became the most successful popularizer of Mises’ ideas, most importantly in his Newsweek column and in his book Economics in One Lesson—a powerful introduction to free market thinking for generations of young libertarians and Buckley-era conservatives. (Reagan told Hazlitt in a 1984 letter that he was “proud to count [him]self as one of your students.”) The central insight of proper economic thinking, Hazlitt stressed, involves trying to notice the “things not seen,” especially relevant when judging government interventions. For example, the inherent value of federal spending is more questionable when you learn to focus not on the visible things the government did with the resources it took via taxation, but on all the unseen things that would have happened had the government not taken the resources in the first place.
Mises’ major work during his first decade in America was Human Action (1949), a nearly 900-page explanation of virtually every aspect of economic science. Fellow travelers in the nascent American libertarian movement saw it as exactly what they needed. Rose Wilder Lane wrote that the book “begins and will stand for a new epoch in human thought, therefore in human action and world history.” Hazlitt declared: “If a single book can turn the ideological tide that has been running in recent years so heavily toward statism, socialism, and totalitarianism, Human Action is that book.” He also wrote that it “should become the leading text of everyone who believes in…a free-market economy,” as the American right once purported to do.
After explaining the hows and whys of such concepts such as marginal utility, price formation, the division of labor, and profit and loss, the book analyzed the ill effects of government interventions, ranging from taxation to price and foreign exchange controls, to restricting production and expanding credit. Mises even attacked legal tender legislation.
Starting in the late 1940s, Mises often gave lectures under the auspices of the first modern libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education, which also educated generations of young conservatives, and older ones like Reagan, in free market verities. In 1948, Mises began a series of seminars at New York University. The participants were usually young business students looking for an easy A or B, as Mises was a notoriously kind grader. But there was also a small group of genuinely interested students, who weren’t always, or even mostly, seeking a degree at the university. Through them, Mises’ seminars ensured that the Austrian economics tradition survived in America. As Robert Nozick, author of the highly influential libertarian book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), once said: “In 18 years of teaching at Princeton and Harvard, I never encountered any professor teaching a seminar where non-degree-seeking adults would continue to attend year after year.…[Mises was] unique in attracting mature minds without demanding discipleship.” What attracted them, Nozick noted, was “the content of his ideas and their power and lucidity.”
Meanwhile, in a sign of Mises’ low status in American academia, as of 1949 his salary was paid not by the university but mostly by the Volker Fund, the sole libertarian funding foundation in existence at the time. When Mises was seeking an American academic berth in the 1940s, his star was so low that “we felt lucky to find some place that would take him,” the Volker Fund’s Richard Cornuelle recalled. “It was more than contempt they felt for Mises. They thought he was dangerous. They thought he was pushing a vicious, inhuman position that appealed to capitalists but didn’t deserve any encouragement.”
As Trump conquers the American right, Mises’ ideas are still dangerous to the regnant forces of both major parties, each offering different culturally coded approaches to managing Americans’ choices and limiting Americans’ liberties. The MAGA movement’s many violations of free market principles break with the wisdom of a man the right honored for decades, an economist whose sophisticated, far-ranging understanding of markets and freedom reveal the folly of so much of Trumpism.
Brian Doherty is a senior editor at Reason, where this article was first published. Doherty is the author of six books, most recently Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States (Libertarianism.org/Cato Institute), from which this article is largely excerpted.
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