Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Foreword by F.A. Hayek
Foreword summary: Mises book first appreared in 1922. Ludwig von Mises was the leading exponent of the Austrian School of economics. His economics were considered outside the mainstream but well respected. He wrote 25 books and hundreds of articles on human action, free markets, and political economy. He presents the economic calculation problem as a criticism of socialist economics. He deals with many of Marx and Engels ideas.
Liberalism and socialism
Chapter 1 Ownership
Mises defense of private property is simple. He makes no apologies for the fact that private property is derived from occupation and violence. And out of violence the law emerged. That social life developed in a rational manner he rejects. That private property is derived from a natural right as a rational outcome of human thought is in error. He rejects any divine right. Private property emerged by law of the stronger.
Socialist believe private property can be attacked for this very reason. That it sprung out of illegality and occupation. Arbitrary aquisition, violence and robbery.
Mises answers that according to this view all legal rights are nothing but time honored illegality. And to demand that the law should have arisen legally is to demand the impossible. That the law was formerly unjust or legally indifferent is not a defect of the legal order. Furthermore, the law surrounding property has developed over two thousand years to realize economic continuity and peacemaking. And that no moral claim can be made to justify abolishing two thousand years of historical law making.
Nor is it necessary or useful to abolish or alter the system of ownership. And to endeavor to demonstrate that the demand to abolish private property ownership were legal would be to demonstrate the absurd.
He further claims even if one were able to demonstrate that common property was once the basis of land law for all nations and that all private property has arisen through illegal acquisition, one would still be far from proving that rational agriculture with intensive cultivation could have developed without private property. Even less permissible would it be to conclude from such premises that private proprty could or should be abolished.
Mises defense of private property is simple. He makes no apologies for the fact that private property is derived from occupation and violence. And out of violence the law emerged. That social life developed in a rational manner he rejects. That private property is derived from a natural right as a rational outcome of human thought is in error. He rejects any divine right. Private property emerged by law of the stronger.
Socialist believe private property can be attacked for this very reason. That it sprung out of illegality and occupation. Arbitrary aquisition, violence and robbery.
Mises answers that according to this view all legal rights are nothing but time honored illegality. And to demand that the law should have arisen legally is to demand the impossible. That the law was formerly unjust or legally indifferent is not a defect of the legal order. Furthermore, the law surrounding property has developed over two thousand years to realize economic continuity and peacemaking. And that no moral claim can be made to justify abolishing two thousand years of historical law making.
Nor is it necessary or useful to abolish or alter the system of ownership. And to endeavor to demonstrate that the demand to abolish private property ownership were legal would be to demonstrate the absurd.
He further claims even if one were able to demonstrate that common property was once the basis of land law for all nations and that all private property has arisen through illegal acquisition, one would still be far from proving that rational agriculture with intensive cultivation could have developed without private property. Even less permissible would it be to conclude from such premises that private proprty could or should be abolished.
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