Interventionism

Hans F. Sennholz, the translator, lays out Mises’s target—the belief in a “third system” of a hampered market economy standing between capitalism and socialism—and why that middle way cannot hold.

Margit von Mises introduces the collection, recalling that these essays date from the 1920s and noting that the final essay was added to the later German edition.

Ryan McMaken dismantles three persistent myths of American healthcare before tracing the origins of social insurance to Bismarck's deliberate scheme to bind citizens to the state "by the chains of gratitude" and closing with Mises' 1944 prediction that a population half-dependent on government healthcare would never vote to dismantle it.

Mises defends his use of the word: true liberalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production, and he explains why he keeps the name despite its distorted modern usage.

Mises's guided reading list of the essential works of liberal thought, from Hume, Smith, and Bentham onward, for readers who want to study the tradition in depth.

Mises argues that modern civilization rests on liberalism and capitalism, and can be destroyed only from within—by the spread of antiliberal ideas, not by any outside enemy.

Why liberalism differs from interest-based parties, the crisis of parliamentary government, and the misleading charge that liberalism is merely the “party of capital.”

Liberalism applied to world affairs: national self-determination, free trade and freedom of movement as the foundations of peace, and critiques of nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism.

The economic case for private property and the free market, including the impracticability of socialism, the failures of interventionism, and the problems of cartels, monopoly, and bureaucracy.

The first principles of liberal politics—private property, freedom, peace, and equality before the law—with a critique of the doctrine of force, fascism, and the proper limits of government.