It Is Vain To Fight Totalitarianism

From Omnipotent Government (1944). Mises was writing in the context of wartime debates about whether liberal democracies should adopt coercive economic measures — rationing, price controls, centralized production — to fight the totalitarian powers. He argued that this strategy was self-defeating: the only durable victory over totalitarianism required preserving the liberal institutions and freedoms that the totalitarians sought to destroy.