Happy Birthday Ludwig von Mises

What have you spent your Nostr zaps on?

In 1936, Keynes famously wrote that paying people to dig holes and fill them back up would boost the economy. Meanwhile, French economist Bastiat was spinning in his grave, having warned a century earlier about the "broken window fallacy" - the illusion that destruction creates wealth.

When New Deal programs put thousands to work building bridges to nowhere, Keynesians cheered the employment statistics. But they ignored what Bastiat called "the unseen" - the private investments never made, the businesses never started, the innovations never pursued because capital was diverted to government make-work.

Today's politicians still invoke Keynesian magic, claiming every trillion in deficit spending creates prosperity. They see the government jobs, the infrastructure projects, the GDP bump.

They don't see the entrepreneur who couldn't get a loan, the startup that never launched, or the future growth sacrificed for today's political theater.

Carl Menger destroyed two thousand years of economic fallacy with a single insight in 1871: value is subjective, existing only in the mind of the individual valuer. The classical economists—from Adam Smith to David Ricardo—had spent centuries chasing their tails, convinced that value somehow resided in objects themselves, whether through labor content or production costs. Menger obliterated this nonsense by pointing out the obvious: a glass of water means nothing to a man by a river but everything to one dying of thirst in the desert.

This breakthrough wasn't just academic—it was revolutionary. By grounding value in human choice and preference, Menger laid the foundation for understanding how markets actually work. Prices don't reflect some mystical "intrinsic worth" but emerge from countless individuals making subjective judgments about their personal wants and needs. And this happens spontaneously, without any central planner needed to "coordinate" anything.

The implications were devastating to statist economics before statist economics even fully existed. If value is subjective, then government price controls become acts of pure violence—bureaucrats literally imposing their subjective valuations on millions of others through force. If value emerges from individual choice, then socialism becomes impossible by definition. You cannot centrally plan what exists only in the minds of individuals.

But the establishment couldn't let this stand. The subjective theory of value made government intervention look like what it is: economic barbarism. So they spent the next century constructing elaborate mathematical models to obscure Menger's simple truth. British pedophile John Maynard Keynes and his disciples built entire careers on ignoring subjective value, pretending that wise technocrats could somehow calculate what only individual actors can know.

The Austrian revolution began with Menger recognizing that value lives in human minds, not in objects—and every government economist has been running from this truth ever since.