Ludwig von Mises
Biography
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was the father of modern Austrian economics. His 1912 The Theory of Money and Credit extended the Austrian framework to monetary theory and laid the groundwork for what later became the Austrian Business Cycle Theory — the explanation that artificial credit expansion by central banks creates booms followed inevitably by busts. His 1922 Socialism demolished the economic calculation case for central planning by showing that without market prices, rational allocation is impossible. Human Action (1949) is his magnum opus — a complete treatise deriving economics from the praxeological axiom of purposeful human behavior. Mises taught at the University of Vienna and, after fleeing the Nazis, at NYU.
Major Works
- Human Action (1949)
- The Theory of Money and Credit (1912)
- Socialism (1922)
- Liberalism (1927)
- Bureaucracy (1944)
The Bitcoin Connection
Mises's regression theorem (1912) was long cited by Austrian economists as a barrier to Bitcoin's success: money, the theorem argues, must originate as a commodity with non-monetary use value, and only later evolve into a medium of exchange. Bitcoin appeared to violate this — it has no prior non-monetary use. But careful readers (most notably Konrad Graf) argue Bitcoin satisfies the regression theorem in a different way: its early users derived non-monetary value from its censorship resistance, programmability, and self-sovereignty. Either way, Mises's framework is the intellectual ground from which the modern Bitcoin Standard argument grows. Saifedean Ammous explicitly extends Mises to Bitcoin in The Bitcoin Standard.