Newspaper Articles by Boehm-Bawerk and Mises re-discovered

by Federico Salazar (Mises Institute, Peru)

Eugen Böhm v. Bawerk “Der Zweck der Volkswirtschaft” | This last book commentary was published in Neue Freie Presse, on Feb 2, 1910. I was very lucky to find it during my research for another topic in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek digital service. Reading Böhm-Bawerk the theorist, the polemicist and the politician on interventionism and its flawed groundings is not only pleasant but also, specially at this moment, enlightening.

Eugen Böhm von Bawerk’s “Macht oder ökonomisches Gesetz?” (english: Power or Economic Law?”), was one of his works published posthumously, in 1914. His epistemological insights converge with his view of public policy based on economic science. There he quarrels with historicism. To justify political interventionism this school of thought denied the methodology of economics based on logic and deduction. Predecessors of this text are the reviews Böhm-Bawerk dedicated to Rudolf Stolzmann’s “Die sociale Kategorie in der Volkswirtschaftslehre” (1896), and “Der Zweck in der Volkswirtschaft” (1909).

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Eugen Böhm v. Bawerk “Der Zweck der Volkswirtschaft”

Ludwig v. Mises “Wiederaufbau und Währungsreform” | Only a radical change in the politics of destructionism and decadency, the politics of collectivism and socialism, said Mises in 1921, would allow the take-off of reconstruction in Austria. Not foreign aid or credit but the deficit clean-up is the first step in order to build up the country. As Mises said at the end of his piece, “to construct, at any rate, goes slower than destruction.” (German: “Aufbauen geht allerdings langsamer vonstatten als zerstören”). Mises’ article on “Reconstruction and Currency Reform”, was published on  June 3, 1921 in Neues Wiener Tagblatt. It’s based on a speech in the Political Society, throwing light on Austrian political and economic problems of that time, problems that are not too different than those we face now in western societies.

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Ludwig v. Mises “Wiederaufbau und Währungsreform”