Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism is the most important critical examination of socialism ever written.
Socialism is most famous for Mises’s penetrating economic calculation argument. The book contains much more however. Mises not only shows the impossibility of socialism: he defends capitalism against the main arguments socialists and other critics have raised against it. A centrally planned system cannot substitute some other form of economic calculation for market prices, because no such alternative exists. Capitalism is true economic democracy.
Socialism addresses the contemporary issues of economic inequality and argues that wealth can exist for long periods only to the extent that wealthy producers succeed in satisfying the consumers. Mises shows that there is no tendency to monopoly in a free market system.
Mises analyzes reform measures, such as social security and labor legislation, which in fact serve to impede the efforts of the capitalist system to serve the masses.
Socialism is a veritable encyclopedia of vital topics in the social sciences, all analyzed with Mises’s unique combination of historical erudition and penetrating insight.
Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that he called praxeology.
The question is not plan or no plan. Everyone plans. The question is whose plan—and what happens to yours when it conflicts with the planner's. Mises traces the path from Marx to Comte to the social engineers, and shows why the destination is always the same.
The right of self-determination is the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong.
Under a system of private ownership, in which the government's only function is to protect property rights, it is immaterial where the frontiers of people's country are drawn.
German original 1922. English, 1951, Yale university Press. Indianapolis: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics, 1981. Full text from Yale University edition.
