Interventionism, Collectivism, and Their Ideological Roots
In the 1920s, one of the contributions for which Mises was most famous was his theory of government intervention. In 1930, he published “The Economic System of Interventionism,” a brief summary of his critique of this practice, with particular emphasis on the deleterious effects from all forms of control over prices. While various forms of production regulations had the tendency to reduce productivity, price controls were a far more directly harmful type of intervention. They inevitably distorted the relationship between supply and demand, artificially generated either shortages or surpluses, and deflected production from those avenues most likely to satisfy consumer demand. They also had a tendency to spread out to more and more sectors of the economy, as the government imposed similar controls on other markets and industries in a vain attempt to compensate for the imbalances the earlier price controls had created. If followed to their logical conclusion, such price controls led to a fully planned economy through piecemeal interventions imposed one after another.
Where did all this lead? In “Economic Order and the Political System” (1936), Mises pointed out that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, political democracy, civil liberty, and economic freedom had grown hand in hand. But in the second half of the nineteenth century the idea had taken hold that political democracy and personal freedom could be preserved even if the government increasingly intervened in and controlled the economic affairs of the citizenry in the name of social justice and socialist planning.
What the twentieth century was showing, however, was that political democracy and individual freedom could not last long when government planning increasingly replaces the market economy. Economic planning means planning people’s lives, and people must then conform in all their affairs to what the plan dictates. In countries like Soviet Russia, fascist Italy, or National Socialist (Nazi) Germany even the appearance of preserving democratic and personal liberties had been discarded and the reality of where planning leads could be most clearly seen. This was the crossroads that now confronted the remaining relatively free and democratic societies in the West: freedom or planning.
More than twenty years later, in 1959, Mises offered “Remarks Concerning the Ideological Roots of the Monetary Catastrophe of 1923,” when hyperinflation had brought Germany to the edge of total economic collapse. He reflected back to when he was a young man before the First World War, during the years when he wrote those early pieces on the gold standard and had only just published The Theory of Money and Credit. He had attended the meetings of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Society for Social Policy), the leading and most influential social science association in the German-speaking world, which was dominated by members of the German Historical School. Here he came face-to-face with the enemies of economic liberalism, who rejected most of economic theory in the name of a historically based approach to social analysis, on the basis of which they rationalized aggressive nationalistic conclusions, all leading to an eventual war. They had contempt for the Austrian economists and ridiculed the idea that there were “laws of economics” that should stand in the way of markets and money being controlled by the state. These were the thinkers who were the harbingers of many of the disasters of the twentieth century. Their aggressive nationalism had led to two world wars; their belief in the interventionist state had cultivated the coming of the planned and regulated society; and their confidence that money and its value were creatures of the state had fostered the inflations of the twentieth century.
And though Mises did not point it out, many of these German thinkers laid the ideological groundwork for the mass murder of millions at the hands of the National Socialists, including the destruction of six million Jews. Indeed, it was because of such ideas and their consequences that Mises himself was forced to flee a Nazi-dominated Europe and find sanctuary in America in the midst of the Second World War.
Leaving Europe for America had not been an easy decision for Mises. Indeed, he said in a letter to Friedrich A. Hayek in May 1940, as he was approaching his departure from Switzerland for the United States, “The decision to leave is truly difficult. For me, it represents saying good-bye to a life which I have always lived, it is for me an ‘adieu’ to a Europe which is about to disappear forever.”55
It is only appropriate, therefore, that before concluding this introduction we should take a look at Mises’s Jewish family roots in the old Habsburg Empire and how the fate of the Austrian Jews led to a man like Mises having to say good-bye to the life and world in which he made his career and won his reputation as one of the leading economists of his time, and his having to make a new start at the age of fifty-eight in the New World.
Liberating Liberalism and the Austrian Jews 56
Ludwig von Mises was born on September 29, 1881, into a prominent Jewish family in Lemberg (Lvov in present-day Ukraine), the capital of the Austrian Crownland of Galicia, far to the east of Vienna and near the border with the Russian Empire. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, more than 50 percent of the population of some parts of Galicia was Jewish, with the center of Jewish life and culture being in Lemberg.57
The documents that Ludwig von Mises’s great-grandfather, Mayer Rachmiel Mises (1801-91), prepared as background for his ennoblement by the Austrian emperor, Francis Joseph, in mid-1881 (just a few months before Ludwig was born), record the history of the Mises family in Lemberg going back to the 1700s. Mayer’s father, Fischel Mises, had been a wholesaler and real estate owner who had received permission to live and conduct business in the “restricted district” reserved for non-Jews. At the age of eighteen, Mayer married a daughter of Hirsch Halberstamm, the leading Russian-German export trader in the Galician city of Brody.
Mayer took over the family business following his father’s death and also served for twenty-five years as a commissioner in the commercial court of Lemberg. For a time he also was on the city council and was a full member of the Lemberg Chamber of Commerce. He also was a cofounder of the Lemberg Savings Bank, and later was a member of the board of the Lemberg branch of the Austrian National Bank. He also was one of the founders of the Cracow-Lemberg railway line. In addition, he was a founder of a Jewish orphanage, a reform school, a secondary education school, a charitable institution for infant orphans, and a library in the Jewish community. Some of these charities were begun with funds provided by Mayer for their endowment. Indeed, it was for his service to the emperor as a leader of the Jewish community in Lemberg that Mayer Mises, great-grandfather of Ludwig von Mises, was ennobled.
Mayer’s oldest son, Abraham Oscar Mises, ran the Vienna office of the family business until he was appointed in 1860 the director of the Lemberg branch of the Credit-Anstalt bank. Abraham also was the director of the Galician Carl-Ludwig Railroad. His other son, Hirsch Mises, was a partner in and a director of the Halberstamm and Nirenstein banking company.58
It is perhaps because of the family’s connection with the railroad business that Hirsch Mises’s son, Arthur Edler von Mises, took up civil engineering with a degree from the Zurich Polytechnic in Switzerland, and then worked for the Lemberg-Czernowitz Railroad Company. Arthur married Adele Landau, the granddaughter of Moses Kallir and the grandniece of Mayer Kallir, a prominent Jewish merchant family in the city of Brody. Arthur and Adele had three sons, of whom Ludwig was the oldest. His brother, Richard, became an internationally renowned mathematician who later taught at Harvard University. The third child died at an early age.
Members of the Mises family also were devout practitioners of their Jewish faith. The vast majority of the Galician Jews were Hasidic, with all the religious customs and rituals that entailed. But the Mises family was part of that movement in the Jewish community devoted to theological and cultural reform, and participated in the liberal-oriented political activities that were attempted in nineteenth-century Galicia. As a small boy, Ludwig would have heard and spoken Yiddish, Polish, and German, and studied Hebrew in preparation for his bar mitzvah.