When Mises claims that “measures that are taken for the purpose of preserving the private-property order are not interventions”, he is implicitly assuming that capitalism under a minimal state is immune from his criticism of interventionism – that it is coherent and stable in a way that an interventionist mixed economy is not. . . . However, in the presence of a government wielding political means, even one that conforms to the minimal or “night-watchman” state, it is arbitrary where one draws the line demarcating interventionism from non-interventionism. The taxes, subsidies, and regulations required to maintain the minimal state, minimal though they may be, interfere with the entrepreneurial competitive process in the same way, though certainly to a lesser degree, as the taxes, subsidies, and regulations of the welfare state or the regulatory state. Defining interventionism as the use of political means in areas beyond those strictly required by the minimal state does not in any way alter the effect that political means will have on the market process within the bounds of the minimal state.
#