Mises Institute

Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty. No matter whether it is their intention or not, almost anything that the rich can legally do tends to help the poor.

" By July 2026, the libertarian president’s approval rating has plummeted to 35.5 percent, with disapproval surging to 63 percent..."

The essay added later to the collection: a critique of proposals to nationalize banking and credit, weighing bureaucratic against profit management and warning of credit overexpansion and immobilization.

Margit von Mises introduces the collection, recalling that these essays date from the 1920s and noting that the final essay was added to the later German edition.

Mises’s focused analysis of price controls: why fixing prices produces shortages and demands for still more controls, and what that reveals for the theory of social organization as a whole.

A critique of the German “Socialists of the Chair” and their social policy—by way of the Methodenstreit, the clash of control versus economic law, and Max Weber—showing how “social liberalism” abandons liberalism itself.

Bob uses U.S. economic history, centering on the greenback era, to work through some subtle but important distinctions in Austrian monetary theory.

Mises examines the doctrine of a “hampered” or regulated market as a distinct third system and answers Schmalenbach’s thesis that free enterprise was giving way to a bound economy.

The central essay: interventionism as a supposed economic system, the real nature of intervention, and how price ceilings, minimum wages, and similar measures defeat their own aims—leaving only a choice between the free market and socialism.

Mises’s 1929 preface, written in Vienna for the original German edition, presenting the essays as a sustained critique of interventionism, then the reigning economic policy across Europe and America.