Timothy Terrell traces the historical origins of the American healthcare cartel, beginning with Ronald Hamowy's 1979 article documenting how the AMA used state licensing laws not to protect patients but to restrict physician supply and raise incomes.
The essay added later to the collection: a critique of proposals to nationalize banking and credit, weighing bureaucratic against profit management and warning of credit overexpansion and immobilization.
Mises’s focused analysis of price controls: why fixing prices produces shortages and demands for still more controls, and what that reveals for the theory of social organization as a whole.
Mises examines the doctrine of a “hampered” or regulated market as a distinct third system and answers Schmalenbach’s thesis that free enterprise was giving way to a bound economy.
The central essay: interventionism as a supposed economic system, the real nature of intervention, and how price ceilings, minimum wages, and similar measures defeat their own aims—leaving only a choice between the free market and socialism.
Mises’s 1929 preface, written in Vienna for the original German edition, presenting the essays as a sustained critique of interventionism, then the reigning economic policy across Europe and America.
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.
