Ludwig Von Mises

The poster-boy of AustrianEconomics?. His magnum opus was the book HumanAction. He proposed that socialism fails because the vast trade-offs of a large economy are more complex than any board of central planners can understand, and that the same problem is solved passably well in capitalist economies because there prices carry information about people's real preferences and local knowledge. Much of his thought centers around the fundamental role that uncertainty plays in the real economic world, and how the freedom to try things and fail is key to the workings of large-scale cooperation, trumping orthodoxies who imagine that they can calculate everything "rationally".

What mankind needs today is liberation from the rule of nonsensical slogans and a return to sound reasoning

Interesting that this line should be posted by someone under the UserName "MicrosoftSlave". Where do you want to go today?

from 1940 work " The Source of Hitler's Success" (untranslated until 1988) at http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1691 (posted Dec2004)

What is wrong with Western civilization is the accepted habit of judging political parties merely by asking whether they seem new and radical enough, not by analyzing whether they are wise or unwise, or whether they are apt to achieve their aims. Not everything that exists today is reasonable; but this does not mean that everything that does not exist is sensible

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