De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas
Mises, Military, and Market
September 29 is the birthday of Ludwig von Mises, one of the giants of the Austrian School of economics. In my book Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action, I distill the work of Mises as presented in his masterpiece, Human Action. Elsewhere I have summarized his contributions to economic science, so in the present post I will focus on a single topic where Mises fundamentally changed my own worldview: the military and the market.
Before I encountered Mises’s analysis, I was a young conservative/libertarian with a strong affinity for the free market. However, although I knew that (say) minimum wage laws wouldn’t really help unskilled workers, and that rent control laws weren’t effective ways to provide affordable housing, nonetheless I made a big exception for genuine emergencies like a world war. In particular, I was not confident in trusting “market forces” with resource allocation for a major undertaking such as fighting the Nazis. In this situation (so I thought), of course you would need a powerful federal government to override price signals and make sure enough steel, rubber, gasoline, etc. went into the war effort.....To Read More....
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