"There is no third system between a market economy and socialism. Mankind has to choose between those two systems—unless chaos is considered an alternative."
— Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government, 1944
Mises wrote Omnipotent Government in wartime America, having fled first Vienna and then Geneva. It was his attempt to explain the rise of the total state to an Anglo-American audience that largely believed the war was a contest between socialism and its opposite.
His argument was that the planned economy and the war economy are the same machine under different names, and that the middle way — the mixed system, the regulated market, the third option that promises the benefits of both — is not a destination but an unstable waypoint. The sentence on this mug is the fork he insisted could not be dodged.
