The work The Six Lessons" exposes in accessible language a conceptual and historical summary of the failure of socialist policies of the last century

In 1958, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was invited to give a series of lectures at the University of Buenos Aires, which would later be transcribed by his wife and published as the book The Six Lessons in 1979.

Mises visited Argentina in a year of great optimism among liberals in that country, as it marked the end of the military dictatorship that overthrew former socialist president Juan Domingo Perón in 1976.

We know today that Argentine optimism would be short-lived, but the book that recorded these lectures became the author's best-selling work, largely due to its accessible language, influencing liberal thought throughout the world to this day.

The first lesson of the book is a short historical introduction to capitalism, refuting the most common criticisms of this economic system based on private ownership of the means of production.

According to Mises, before the development of modern capitalism, society was heading towards a Malthusian-style crisis, due to the limited availability of natural resources to support a growing and unproductive population.

The free market is unlikely to reverse this scenario, as a dangerous precedent has been created that discourages investment in new real estate developments. Thus, in September 2021, the population voted in a referendum for the expropriation of more than 200,000 residential units in the city, moving in the exact direction predicted by Mises.

The fourth lesson concerns inflation, defined as the expansion of a country's monetary base, which results in a widespread, although not homogeneous, increase in prices. Mises reinforces that this phenomenon is not natural to the economy or inevitable, but rather the result of a premeditated policy to combat unemployment in the very short term to the detriment of economic stability and equity in the medium and long term. It is not surprising that this is another of the book's lessons still ignored by the political class and its electoral bases.

Since the start of the current pandemic, central banks around the world have resorted to expanding their monetary bases to stimulate their economies, whether through open market operations to reduce their base interest rates, but also through direct income distribution. with so-called emergency aid. The result, also not surprising, was an increase in the prices of consumer goods, as well as an even greater increase in the prices of financial and real estate assets, further amplifying economic inequality.

Although technically inflation can be avoided as Mises argues, in practice political incentives seem to make it inevitable in a democracy in which the State has control over money. Precisely to avoid the perpetuation of this state of things, Bitcoin was invented in October 2008, not coincidentally during the last major financial crisis, and presents itself as an alternative monetary system free from state intervention.

The fifth chapter is about foreign investments, developing the idea that the difference in income and standard of living between different countries does not result from the personal attributes of their workers, but rather from the difference in the availability of capital in these countries.

According to Mises, it is the accumulation of capital that makes a country's workers more productive and it is their productivity that gives them greater income and a better standard of living. Since the 19th century, foreign investment, especially of English origin, has become the most important tool in accelerating capital accumulation by other less developed countries.

However, since the First World War, several countries began to expropriate the foreign capital invested in them, either in the form of debt default or through the nationalization of foreign companies in their territories. This problem persists to this day and discourages foreign investment exactly in the countries where it is most needed today.

The sixth and final lesson is about politics and ideas, dealing with the origin and evolution of the party political system. Mises explains that this system was born based on the premise that different groups, all in search of the common good, would discuss their different ideas among themselves and with society, in order to convince the absolute majority that a certain path would be best for everyone.

However, it was also assumed that the government could not intervene in economic market conditions. By violating this last premise, such groups began to be encouraged to no longer represent the entire nation, but rather specific segments of the industry and society in search of their own benefit, becoming true pressure groups.

In the end, Mises explains the fall of the Roman Empire as a consequence of policies similar to those practiced in his time and which persist to this day. According to him, inflation caused by the manipulation of their currency led the Romans to increasingly intervene in the economy, especially via price controls. This resulted in a severe shortage of products, including food, forcing an increasing migration from the cities to the countryside, where people's productivity and standard of living deteriorated and led to the military weakening of the empire.

In his conclusion, Mises states that today we can avoid this fate, since we have knowledge about the consequences of the measures that led the Roman Empire to collapse, and it is only up to us to avoid them. This is exactly the objective achieved by the work, by presenting in accessible language a conceptual and historical summary of the failure of socialist policies of the last century. Despite its content being over 60 years old, it is still probably the best introduction to liberal thought aimed at a general audience. If this knowledge were more widespread, perhaps there would be less room for the interventionist and inflationary policies still practiced by governments around the world.