By F.A. Harper When asked to contribute an essay to Professor Mises's Festschrift, I was at first inclined to dip my pen in the well of humility and then lay it aside unused. On what economic theme has Professor Mises himself failed to write with a superiority to anything I could offer? Yet honor is due him. So I trust that friends of this great and patient teacher will tolerate an essay's imperfections for the sake of the spirit of an offering.
Professor Mises's main renown is as an economist. Yet to me he is a charitable person even more than an economist. His charity is not of the fashionable kind that ladles out economic pleasantries from a caldron filled with socialist loot obtained by theft. His is not even primarily of the material sort at all but is, instead, in the form of his inspiring mind and spirit. In my opinion there can be no greater charity than this, for it endures beyond any material form of benevolence.
In this essay I shall be dealing, however, with one aspect of economic charity — a form inferior to charity of the mind and the spirit. People spend vast sums trying to do good with economic alms in forms which, to me, seem open to serious question. In their haste to do good and to bask in the glow of immediate glory as purveyors of alms, they are being exceedingly wasteful of the… (Read more)
Source: Mises.org
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