Ludwig Von Mises - Criticisms

Criticisms

Milton Friedman considered Mises inflexible in his thinking:

The story I remember best happened at the initial Mont Pelerin meeting when he got up and said, "You're all a bunch of socialists." We were discussing the distribution of income, and whether you should have progressive income taxes. Some of the people there were expressing the view that there could be a justification for it.

Another occasion which is equally telling: Fritz Machlup was a student of Mises's, one of his most faithful disciples. At one of the Mont Pelerin meetings, Machlup gave a talk in which I think he questioned the idea of a gold standard; he came out in favor of floating exchange rates. Mises was so mad he wouldn't speak to Machlup for three years. Some people had to come around and bring them together again. It's hard to understand; you can get some understanding of it by taking into account how people like Mises were persecuted in their lives.

Within the post-WWII mainstream economics establishment, Mises suffered severe personal rejection: for example, in a 1957 review of his book The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, The Economist said of von Mises: "Professor von Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard." Conservative commentator Whittaker Chambers published a similarly negative review of that book in the National Review, stating that Mises's thesis that anti-capitalist sentiment was rooted in "envy" epitomized "know-nothing conservatism" at its "know-nothingest." Economic historian Bruce Caldwell writes that in the mid-20th century, with the ascendance of positivism and Keynesianism, Mises came to be perceived by many as the "archetypal 'unscientific' economist."

In a 1978 interview, Friedrich Hayek said about his book Socialism: "At first we all felt he was frightfully exaggerating and even offensive in tone. You see, he hurt all our deepest feelings, but gradually he won us around, although for a long time I had to – I just learned he was usually right in his conclusions, but I was not completely satisfied with his argument." (Hayek's critique of central planning never incorporated Mises' contention that prices as an indicator of scarcity can only arise in monetary exchanges among responsible owners, a particular case of the universal economic law that value judgements are utterly dependent on property rights constraints.)

Murray Rothbard, who studied under Mises, agrees he was uncompromising, but disputes reports of his abrasiveness. In his words, Mises was "unbelievably sweet, constantly finding research projects for students to do, unfailingly courteous, and never bitter" about the discrimination he received at the hands of the economic establishment of his time.

After his death, his wife quoted a passage that Mises had written about Benjamin Anderson, and said that it best described Mises' own personality: "His most eminent qualities were his inflexible honesty, his unhesitating sincerity. He never yielded. He always freely enunciated what he considered to be true. If he had been prepared to suppress or only to soften his criticisms of popular, but irresponsible, policies, the most influential positions and offices would have been offered him. But he never compromised."

A number of critics of Mises, including philosopher Herbert Marcuse, economist J. Bradford DeLong and sociologist Richard Seymour, have criticized Mises for writing approvingly of Italian fascism, especially for its suppression of leftist elements. Von Mises wrote in Liberalism, a book published in 1927:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.

Mises biographer and supporter Jörg Guido Hülsmann calls the criticism that Mises supported fascism "absurd", pointing to the rest of the quote that called fascism dangerous and described as a "fatal error" the view that it was more than an "emergency makeshift" against the threat of communism.