Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy
by Ludwig von Mises
Published in 1944
148 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 4/5


In the last days of WW2, Mises wrote a book about the creeping government bureaucracy that he saw as a result of the war effort. He feared that the bureaucracy would persist after the war, and slowly become totalitarian. America was at war with fascist socialism in Germany and Soviet socialism in Russia, but at home, was also falling prey to the same forces.


The book exposes the problems of incentive and give an overview of the socialist calculation problem. Mises makes it clear that non-market forces act in fundamentally unnatural ways, and must therefore constantly be supervised by semi-totalitarian controllers. The behavior of these controllers becomes increasingly totalitarian as the bureaucracy struggles to survive.