PRAYER FOR THE PAST
Groves, Harold M.
Prayer for the Past HUMAN ACTION: A Treatise on Economics, by Ludwig von Mises. Yale University Press. 889 pp. $10. Reviewed by Harold M. Groves THE JACKET says Ludwig von Mises is...
...His explanation of Soviet Russia's escape from this dilemma, namely, that it borrows from the free market techniques of other countries, is equally unconvincing...
...any notion that the government might serve human needs as a cooperative enterprise is never seriously entertained...
...But what if the common man, not sharing this nostalgia for the 19th Century, makes a free political choice against the free market...
...neither factory legislation nor labor unions ever did or could improve the lot of the work-ingman...
...public works only serve to intensify depressions...
...The author's distrust of government is nothing short of amazing...
...Yet the book abounds with such unsupported statements as the following: "The outcome of the municipalization and nationalization policies of the last decades was almost without exception financial failure, poor service, and political corruption...
...One need not call this a value judgment but it is an example of the difficulty (and the author's failure) in divorcing economics from subjective bias...
...and (2) that the free market system practically always serves the economic interests of all the people, and all intervention by government only obstructs the beneficent results of automatism...
...Claim to a special achievement in scientific method rests upon his renunciation of "value judgments" and his concentration of "means" to the exclusion of "ends...
...II Mises does a thorough and convincing job of deflating Marxian ideology...
...He explains effectively how Marx rejected the idea of a universally valid logic, substituting therefor the notion that proletarian thought leads to acceptable answers but so-called bourgeois reasoning is only rationalization...
...Mises has written a well-reasoned exposition of classical economics and an ardent defense of the free market and laissez-faire...
...an unemployed worker could always get a job if he would only accept the right pay (Keynes thought otherwise, to be sure, but he was only one of a long line of soft-money cranks...
...monopoly is not a serious problem and anti-trust programs are only an obstruction to progress...
...He scores again in exposing the quasi-theological character of much collectivist doctrine and its manifest-destiny interpretations of history...
...Mises is completely unconvincing in his oft-repeated conclusions (1) that there is no tenable middle ground between a completely free-market economy and dictatorial socialism...
...In the latter case he must be the victim of false propaganda, misled by the press and by the hundreds of socialists occupying chairs of economics in our universities...
...Reviewed by Harold M. Groves THE JACKET says Ludwig von Mises is "internationally known as the head of the 'Austrian school' of economics, the teacher of F. A. von Hayek (Road to Serfdom) and of many other economists, who largely through him have come to know economics as an inquiry into human action, based on principles no less rigorous than those of the natural sciences...
...Starting with these premises and biases, the author is able to reach such conclusions as: attempts to police narcotic drugs are ill-advised paternalism...
...The truth is, of course, that many equally honest and competent scholars could cover the ground surveyed by this author and come out with an entirely different set of answers...
...The author extols the free market because it gives free play to the choices of the common man...
...For him the only legitimate function of government is to serve as a policeman...
...The author is much less convincing when he argues that socialism is beyond human power and would lead to inevitable chaos simply because without a free market the planners would have no means of calculation in allotting resources...
Vol. 14 • February 1950 • No. 2
