My Years with Ludwig von Mises.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

the walls of economic principle, there is something inspiring in the
spectacle of a man who, on the basis of an almost unsurpassed
knowledge of economic history and theory, puts his foot down and
says: "No. To quit the sure automatic judgment of the free market,
the free play of prices against a background of sound currency, is to
leave a sure road for a morass. For every problem that state interference
with the free market may seem to solve two or three others,
probably more serious, will come up."
Here is the octogenarian economist, amazingly young and fresh in
his attitude towards work and life, speaking for himself, in excerpts
from his addresses and books:
"The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is: Whose
plan? Should each member of society plan for himself or should a
benevolent government alone plan for them all?"
"Laissez-faire means let each individual choose how he individually
wants to cooperate in the social division of labor. Let the consumer
determine what the entrepreneurs should produce."
"If control of production is shifted from the hands of the entrepreneursdaily
reelected by a plebiscite of the consumers, into the hands
of the supreme commander of the industrial armies (Marx and Engels)
or in those of the 'armed workers' (Lenin), neither representative
government nor individual rights can survive. Wall Street,
against which the self-styled idealists are battling, is merely a symbol.
But the walls of the Soviet prisons, within which all dissenters
disappear forever, are a hard fact."
Von Mises has been a very persuasive evangel of his cause, which
would have been called liberalism in the Nineteenth Century and
might be more clearly described as conservatism in the Twentieth.
He is one -of the most influential members of the Mont Pelerin
Society, an international association of economists, political scientists,
historians and journalists set up in 1947 on principles emphasizing
the integral nature of freedom, the inseparable connection
between a free economy, a free society and a free way of life.
Wilhelm Roepke, the noted German economist, now a resident of
Switzerland, author of many books about the basis of a free economy
and now president of the Mont Pelerin Society, said, in congratulating
von Mises on his eightieth birthday:
"I would like to stress, on this occasion, how immense is my debt
to Ludwig von Mises for having rendered me immune, at a very early
date, from the virus of socialism with which most of us came back
from World War I."
Austrian-born Professor Gottfried Haberler, of Harvard, describes
the rare stimulation which he and other then-young scholars derived
from the seminar which von Mises held in Vienna before the war.
First there would be hours of serious discussion. Then the participants
would adjourn to a well-known Italian restaurant. There would
be a final session in a famous Vienna cafe, lasting until 1 A.M. And
the next· day, fresh and fit, von Mises would appear at his office
punctually at 9....
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