Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (1881 – 1973) was an economist, historian, logician, and sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberalism. Mises was born to Jewish parents in the city of Lemberg, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine). He is best known for his work on praxeology, a study of human choice and action.

In the years from 1904 to 1914, Mises attended lectures given by Austrian economist Eugen Ritter von Böhm-Bawerk. He graduated in February 1906 (Juris Doctor) and started a career as a civil servant in Austria’s financial administration. After a few months, he left to take a trainee position in a Vienna law firm. During that time, Mises began lecturing on economics and in early 1909 joined the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry. In 1934, Mises left Austria for Geneva, Switzerland, where he was a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies until 1940, when he emigrated to the United States. Mises became a visiting professor at New York University and held this position from 1945 until his retirement in 1969. For part of this period, Mises studied currency issues for the Pan-Europa movement, which was led by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, a fellow New York University faculty member and Austrian exile.

The first German edition of Von Mises’ book Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (The Theory of Money and Credit) appeared in 1912. It is discussed by Lawrence S. Moss in The Monetary Economics of Ludwig von Mises. He summarizes Mises’s views as follows:

As a practical matter, Mises favored commodity gold standard whereby each government would have to maintain the convertibility of money in terms of gold. Any policy of inflationism would be short lived in the wake of declining gold reserves, or the state would suffer the diplomatic embarrassment of having to redefine its currency unit in terms of gold. Mises, of course, realized that the resource costs of such a monetary arrangement are high, and the system itself is never totally insured against sudden and sometimes massive changes in the quantity of money that originate from, say, technological innovations in the processing of gold or new mine discoveries. But the virtue of the arrangement is not that it makes it too costly for the size and growth of the money supply to become an object of government policy. Mises preferred the impersonal mechanisms of the market, no matter how imperfect, to the whims and gluttonous excesses of power-hungry politicians. In Mises’ view, the strategy that is currently favored in liberal quarters, that of moving toward a less expensive fiat currency system while urging the monetary authorities to pass parliamentary decrees limiting their own appetities, is as idealistic as expecting a child not to eat candy placed in his hand.Source: Lawrence S. Moss, The Economics of Ludwig von Mises: Toward a Critical Reappraisal, ed. with an Introduction by Laurence S. Moss (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1976).

Lawrence S. Moss in The Monetary Economics of Ludwig von Mises.

Bar. Dr. rer. nat. h.c. R.A.U. Juchter van Bergen Quast, LLM | Chief Executive Officer, Swiss Chamber of Commerce in The Netherlands.

Prof. Dr. hab. Dr. phil. V.P. Andrushchenko | Rector, National Pedagogical Dragomanov University in Kiev | Academician, National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine.

Prof. Dr. phil. h.c. Dr. rer. nat. h.c. M. Hunzinger | Honorary Professor in the field of public relations at the National Pedagogical Dragomanov University in Kiev.