I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Toby Baxendale 29
whole political outlook. By 1996, my business affairs were going well. Sitting down at my
computer and looking at my books I thought it might be time to stimulate those philosophical
gray cells again. I thought of some of the works of Hayek and how he repeatedly refers
to an individual called Ludwig von Mises. I put that name into the search engine and—
bingo! The Ludwig von Mises Institute came up. All of a sudden, the mist in my mind
began to clear and a great clarity began to develop as I delved more and more into the work
of Ludwig von Mises, and also Freidrich von Hayek when he was an economist at the LSE.
Articles on the website were so sound, crisp, clear in their exposition, I thought I must look
deeper into who von Mises was and to this end I bought my first book of his, Human Action.
This amounted to a false start, because as I read the first few chapters I thought: what the
hell is this all about—there are too many long words here. So I put it aside while my business
went through a massive growth spurt.
Next, I took the opportunity of buying Percy Greaves’s Mises Made Easier. It gave me
the key, I realised, to understanding the first two hundred pages of Human Action. After
a certain amount of dogged determination, the genius and simplicity of the book became
apparent to me.
You start with one irrefutable axiom: that humans act purposefully. Within this premise
is implied all the laws that govern purposeful behaviour, just as a right-angled triangle
implies Pythagoras’s Theorem. So Mises’s theorem, though the axiom of action is: people
act to remove uneasiness at all points in time and this is purposeful. They prefer goods now
rather that later, from this you get the Law of Diminishing Returns, The Laws of Supply
and Demand, the theory of interest etc, etc. From this, you can deduce the—indeed, the
laws of everything in economics, which Human Action so beautifully does.
One of the problems I carried from the LSE was the notion of having to justify a truly
free and liberal society on the basis of the Hayekian evolutionary spontaneous order. This
in turn had its foundations in the rather unfortunate mystical notion of the “invisible hand”
of Adam Smith and each individual, seeking his own personal benefit nevertheless served
the general good. This last point had been fine to justify the end point of where I wanted
to be, but as a weapon in the critique of any social engineering or socialist system, I did not
feel it hit the nail on the head. Hayek’s final work—The Fatal Conceit—attacked the rationalistic
ambitions of central planners who sought to manage the economy and efficiently
allocate resources amongst competing ends by saying—this is impossible; the knowledge
to do it could never be held within the hands of central planners. Also, individuals utilizing
the price mechanism succeeded in efficiently allocating resources through a process of
spontaneous evolution.
Mises’s Human Action, starting from the axiom of action, showed me how man, through
his very reason, actually produced the most robust “planned” economy possible. The free
market coordinated the actions of billions of rational humans, each seeking to remove
uneasiness. They take goods and services from those people who remove these feelings to
form the greatest of all things: societies based on human co-operation and the division of
labour that massively enriches all its participants. It became clear to me how any intervention
in this process whatsoever is detrimental to the good of that society. According to the
irrefutable logic of action and economic laws that emanate from this, the process of logical