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Ludwig von Mises was born on September 29, 1881 in Lemberg, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Mises was the eldest of the three boys in his family. During his early childhood, one of his brothers died. His other brother became well-known as the mathematician of the family. His father worked as a construction engineer for the Austrian Railroad Ministry.

For schooling, von Mises attended a private elementary school in Vienna, Austria. When he finished school, he attended the University of Vienna where he studied in the tradition of the founder of the Austrian School, Carl Menger. He received his doctorate at 27. Mises also attended the seminar of the other giant of the School, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk. Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk was the finance minister of Austria-Hungary at the time, and he put the school’s ideas into practice by balancing the budget and establishing a gold standard.

As a youth Mises saw the market become more and more socialist. He took a great interest in government issues, and was a great reader. During this early time in his life, Mises became an “anti-Marxian.” This was the beginnings of his stand against communism. For a University assignment Mises researched the housing conditions in Austria, and this led him to question all government intervention. He found that builders wanted to build houses and factories, but taxes and government regulations made it difficult, and more expensive.

It is also important to remember that Mises was a student at the time of the Russian revolution. A fellow student at the time was Bauer, who was a Marxist. He and Mises had many discussions. During one discussion Mises said, “Austria cannot feed herself; she depends on imports of food. If private property is confiscated and private enterprises are foreign, countries will come to a halt. Within a few days Bolshevism in Vienna would create starvation and terror. Plundering hordes would soon roam the streets and a second blood bath would destroy the remnants of Viennese culture and civilization.”

Finally Mises convinced Bauer who was now the leader of the Social-Democratic Party. He said that “Socialism had to be postponed because private trade was so much more superior at getting supplies into the country.” In the end, it was this rejection of the extreme communism that saved Austria. The conclusion was because Mises persuaded Bauer to compromise his extreme socialist principles, Bauer never forgave or spoke to Mises again.

Ludwig von Mises taught economics from 1906 to 1912. After receiving his Ph.D., he set to work on The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), his first major book. This was connected to the teachings of Bohm-Bawerk. The publication of this book gained 31-year-old Mises an Europe-wide reputation. He served in World War I in the Austro-Hungarian Cavalry on the eastern (Russian) front.

However after the war he saw the gold standard, the strengthened central banking, and a century of free markets come to an end. In 1918 he was invested with the title of “Professor Extraordinary” at the University of Vienna.

After World War I, communism was “the wave of the future.” People were poor, unemployed, starving and discouraged. Communism, the revolution claimed, would ease economical suffering and at the same time help to reduce national conflicts. Mises sympathized, but disagreed that a communist revolution was the answer. The communists believed that people could be moved to places to increase production. Mises said that the only way this could help would be to “keep the peace only by transforming the people into slaves.”

Mises’ first serious attack on Communism was in a 1920 article, which two years later appeared in his book, called “Socialism.” In it, he explained that if the Communists wanted to make all property communal, this led to no competition for goods and services, no market prices, and no profit and loss system. This means there would be economic waste, malinvestiment, production bottlenecks, malinvestiment, production bottlenecks, surpluses of some things and shortages of others.

These were but two books Mises wrote in English and German on Economics. He took “an uncompromising stand that communism could not work because without private ownership of production there could be no rational allocation of resources in the economy.”

Foreseeing the threat of Hitler’s army, Mises left Vienna in 1934, and took a position at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, although he retained his old apartment and ties in Vienna.

In 1938 Mises married Margit Sereny, after warning her that while he would write much about money, he would never have much of it!

In 1940, they emigrated to the United States, after Hitler had taken France. At 59, Mises had to start over in a new land, writing, lecturing, and teaching to a new audience. Although at this time every communist and social democratic exile from Europe were given a high academic post in the United States, Mises refused such a job because he was for “Free Market Economics.” Despite this, with the help of Henry Hazlitt and Lawrence Fertig, Mises secured a visiting professorship at New York University’s Graduate School of business, where his salary was paid by business people and foundations. Because Mises would not accept the Communism form, he was never to be a regular member of the faculty. In fact the dean lobbed good students not to take Mises’s “right-wing, reactionary” classes. Mises was neither bitter nor resentful, as he carried on his fight for Austrian economics and freedom. “Although his books were often criticized severely when they appeared, his analyses of Communism, etc. all firmly based on human action principles, live on and are gaining increasingly serious attention from scholars.”

Mises acquired his US citizenship in 1946. From this year until 1973, he held the position of Adviser of the Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.

When he retired in 1969, at 87, he was the oldest active professor in the United States. He could look back on a lifetime of teaching and writing - 25 books and more than 250 scholarly articles - and of achievements for liberty. His students, Wilhelm Ropke and Ludwig Erhard had turned Germany towards freedom, and kindled the “economic miracle.” In Italy, Mises’s friend and follower, Luigi Einaudi, had, as president, led the successful fight against a communist takeover. In France, his student, Jacques Rueff - as advisor to General DeGaulle - led the fight for sound money and free markets. In the United States, Mises inspired Murray N. Rothbard, the Mises Institute’s first head of academic affairs, and an entire new generation of young academics.

Mises opposed the planned society (communism). He held that a free society, and a free market is inseparable. He gloried in the potential of reason and man. In sum, he stood for principle in the finest tradition of western civilization. Professor von Mises was considered one of the world’s greatest thinkers.

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Ludwig von Mises died in St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York, N.Y. on October 10, 1973 at the age of 92 years. Mises was a man really into economics, and he will live forever in economists’ hearts.

Visit the Ludwig von Mises website, hosted by Auburn University