J Gardner

You know about Einstein and much of his work, yet you probably can't name a single thing Ludwig von Mises did, and that's a scandal. In 1920 Mises published "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." He proved, in a few dozen pages, that a socialist economy cannot allocate resources rationally. No private ownership of the means of production means no market for capital goods. No market means no prices. No prices means no way to compare the value of building a steel mill versus a rail line. The planners are flying blind. Seventy years later the Soviet Union collapsed under exactly the contradiction he described, and the men who run economics departments still pretend he was wrong on technical grounds. He called it in 1920. They called it bad luck in 1991. Then there's "Human Action," 900 pages he wrote in his second language, building economics up from a single self-evident starting point: man acts. He acts to remove felt uneasiness. From that one axiom Mises derived the entire structure of prices, interest, money, and the business cycle without a single regression or pretend-physics equation. Einstein had the decency to work with constants that actually hold. You cannot run a controlled experiment on a human being who learns, anticipates, and changes his mind. Mises refused to fake one. The profession punished him for this honesty by handing Nobel prizes to people who model the economy like a billiard table. Consider the man's life. He fled Vienna in 1934 as the Nazis closed in, then fled Geneva in 1940, landing in New York with no job and no English-language reputation. Harvard and Princeton, busy hiring central planners, never offered him a paid chair. He taught at NYU on a salary funded by private donors, including the William Volker Fund. Friedrich Hayek, his student, took the 1974 Nobel. Mises died in 1973, one year too early, never having received a dime of official recognition for being right about the largest economic question of the twentieth century. You were taught to revere the man who explained the stars. The man who explained economic reality got erased. In a just society, Mises would have received multiple Nobel prizes. Do you agree?