Apparently, some new book blames the whole of the meltdown on Mises because Mises said that “social spending as opposed to private consumption was the road to serfdom and tyranny.”
Heck of a way to sum up 70 years of scholarship and teaching.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/10383/its-all-misess-fault/
It’s all Mises’s fault
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The truth is worse. Austrians never had much influence on economic practice in the real world. It is full of Keynesians and monetarists.
What a joke. Austrian economics is not about increasing consumption in order to drive up profits, and tax revenues derived from those profits. We have Keynes for that.
Austrian economics is about increasing production. That requires savings, which is the opposite of consumption.
One must remember that these people do not hate consumption, they just hate “private” consumption. If the wise and all-knowing politicians are the people “consuming”, then we have Utopia.
“social spending as opposed to private consumption was the road to serfdom and tyranny.”
I don’t see a problem with that statement. Social spending seems to always involve a forced redistribution and what is an increase in private consumption other than another way of saying increase in standard of living. Indeed I would argue that the purported reason behind social spending is to increase the private consumption of the recipients. The only real difference would seem to be who is consuming and the reduction in total consumption due to the expense of redistributing. Many individuals willing give part of their resources to charity to be redistributed but few approve of it being taken from them with no control on their part as to who receives. When redistribution is forced it seems obvious that it increases the tyranny applied to the original owners of the resources. Conversely, since increases in redistribution increase the dependence of the recipients on handouts then a case could be made that an increase in serfdom also occurs. The latter case does not have to be but I personally have never seen a social program truly structured so that dependence is reduced.
There’s a massive and growing “intellectual” movement in the universities against “neo-liberalism”, linking that horrible thing to Friedman, Hayek, and Mises.
This is mostly stuff written by the tens of thousands of leftist / Marxist types in the various humanities, social science and “XYZ Studies” departments.
“Neoliberalism” brings over 1.4 million hits on Google.
“Neoliberal” brings 3.93 million hits on Google.
This phenomena isn’t going away.
@ Greg:
You are absolutely correct, unfortunately. During my studies at a public university virtually ever humanities and social(ist) science course paid significant reference to the age of ‘deregulation, private property, unfettered free markets and privatization’. Apparently the libertarian society is here now and wreaking havoc on civilization as we know it.
Of course, this is all news to me. I had no idea we had an unhampered market and limited government but what do I know anyways? I guess I just did not understand that a limited government was one in which everything from your toilet bowl tank to what you put into your own body was regulated. How could I have been so naive to think a free market did not entail government spending as more than 40% of the GDP?
Jeremy (and Greg):
Don’t, for a minute, think you’ll be able to support your side of the argument by a collection of data and facts from history.
They’ll have that covered, with a significant portion of their academic specialists busily rewriting whatever history might be relevant. It’s how they do things.
So sad, albeit reading that marketing and advertising nullified marginal utility was kind of a relief…
If it’s any consolation, not all of us in the humanities (which is what my Ph.D. is in) are neo-Marxists and such rot. There are a few of us — Frederick Turner and Paul Cantor, just to name two — who support free markets and are basically Austrians in our thinking.
The Guardian is the newspaper of the civil service in Britain. It is consistently very left wing. It’s readers are often called Guardianistas or “The Righteous” on British blogs.
This isn’t the first time they’ve had a go at Hayek and Mises, or at the LvMI.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2009/may/08/somalia
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/02/g20-osama-bin-laden
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/25/economy-marketturmoil
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/16/worrybehappy
That last one is rather good, the rest are daft and just demonstrate how ignorant newspaper columnists are.
Sad? You want to hear sad. I live in Latin America, where aside from you’re usual “neo-liberal”, Keynesian baloney you have to put up with anti-americanism, social justice and all the Anti-capitalist rhetoric the status quo can muster. Lucky, for me I can always read something inteligent from mises.org
@ luisdiego22002:
I’m all too familiar with what you’re saying (I’m from Israel, just imagine the kind of minority i’m in…)
Lucky for us we’re staunch individualists. Our arguments don’t depend on numbers game, just on strong premises built on the truth many majorities aren’t willing to hear.
Truth to tell, truth-tellers have historically either been laughed at, ignored, vilified; or nailed to crosses, or reasonable facsimiles thereof.
A spirit-buoying reminder: it’s when they ignore you that it’s time to cry. When they talk nonsense about you, yer mom, and your sports team, that you know you’ve hit one out of the pahk (I mean, “park”. Sorry, ‘Bamans, but I’m from Boston). Try to understand.
Peace.
I read Julian Baggini’s from one of the links supplied by Current. Obviously, he’s either very confused or very ignorant. Was I the only person to understand that he groups Von Mises with mathematical, empirical economists a la Freidman and Keynes? He talks about behaviour (probably more a Skinner-like sense) and something akin to subjective values as opposed to what Mises said. Aren’t journalists supposed to research first, and have an opinion? This isn’t just misconstruing, it’s misinforming. To top it all off, he actually uses the phrase “Human Action” in the final sentence as part of his critique of Mises. Wow.
Finally, to use quotes by Keynes, the man whose theory is responsible for this mess, is far beyond irony. In honest truth, Bertrand Russell was right when he said that most men would rather die than think.
The pseudoscience of Al Gore has now morphed into pseudohistory to give the ego-driven interventionists and the ego-driven interpreters another propaganda tool.
Lies and half-truths are what the unConstitutional coup and its allies in their attempt at worldwide hegemony must depend upon. Sleaze upon sleaze!
Couple of years ago I did a bachelor’s thesis in philosophy on “market fundamentalism”, wherein I defended Hayek and tried to set the record straight vis-a-vis the Neomarxists and Scientific-relativist authors. The attack on Hayek-Mises-Friedman (in arbitrary order) looks very familiar to me in this context. I actually took on my thesis supervisor in this thesis and he knew squat about Hayek, Friedman and the difference between them (and I learned to in the process of doing the thesis).
The sources are attacks on neoliberalism a.k.a. market fundamentalism which one can find in works by John Gray and “Globalisation” by George Soros. Also “Empire” by neomarxists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt has been very influential in this scene.
Market fundamentalism just means being fundmental on the workings of the market. That’s a big offense because as all ‘educated’ neomarxists know, there is no such thing as absolute truth or an absolute foundation of truth: Descartes foundation failed and we shouldn’t look further.
The interesting thing about all this literature is that they have a lot of facts right. Soros, Gray, Klein (Naomi), Hertz and others have a lot of facts right! But the sting is in the bizarre interpretations of these facts. Parallel universes are set up to ‘explain’ but they do no such thing. Also political ideology plays a major role in these (sometimes not even claiming the pretention of) ‘scientific’ explanations and/or major cognitive dissonance. Because in the end, life pretty much sucks, especially for neomarxists et al., because they pretty much get what they want all the time, but it doesn’t seem to work in any way because of the evil free market.
I recommend above mentioned works to anyone with a good understanding of austrian economics and political science and history. Because you then not know only why you’re right, but why these other people are wrong and how.
The problem here is that through a Gramscian infiltration of just about every government institution at a national and international level, socialists of all denominations have managed to by-pass early “revolutionary” tactics of a more violent nature in favor of strategies working in a more veiled form. This has permited them to work thru a system they formerly so abhored, especially formal “public education” and multinational organizations like WHO, United Nations whose sole function has been to export such ideas as moral relativism, cultural relativism (instead of cultural diversity), etc. Obviously, they´ve had help from strange bed fellows like multinational corporations, and “capitalists” whose objective is also to propagate their agendas regardless of who serves that purpose.
Have quickly skimmed the article in question, and it seems to be a book review by someone who can read but does not know much about economics. However, rather than reading “ha-ha! what a ditz!”-type comments, I’d prefer to know what libertarians think of the 2nd half of the sentence Tucker quotes: Their argument, in an era of Nazism and communism, that social spending as opposed to private consumption was the road to serfdom and tyranny sowed the seeds of the low-tax, small-state, free-market agendas of Reagan and Thatcher.
Firstly, is that true? Secondly, if Thatcher and Reagan were big fans of Hayek, how then to explain that their regimes resulted in MORE power for the State, not less?
Have quickly skimmed the article in question, and it seems to be a book review by someone who can read but does not know much about economics. However, rather than reading “ha-ha! what a ditz!”-type comments, I’d prefer to know what libertarians think of the 2nd half of the sentence Tucker quotes: Their argument, in an era of Nazism and communism, that social spending as opposed to private consumption was the road to serfdom and tyranny sowed the seeds of the low-tax, small-state, free-market agendas of Reagan and Thatcher.
Firstly, is that true? Secondly, if Thatcher and Reagan were big fans of Hayek, how then to explain that their regimes resulted in MORE power for the State, not less?
Just how much Hayek was an influence to the thinking of Reagan or Thatcher is impossible to know. In practice, though, their actions were more of neo-conservative strain than libertarian which is why, in my view, governments grew. (Supposedly, both carried personal copies of “A Road to Serfdom” with them).
Somehow, I can’t envision them constantly carrying this or any other book with them, though, at all times. They weren’t actual libertarians at any rate.
“Neo-liberales”, popular term with latinamerican lefties.
In Spanish it`s definition would be: “anyone who believes in a free market.” I`ve heard it so many times and I still can`t grasp it.
from the Guardian article
“that social spending as opposed to private consumption was the road to serfdom and tyranny sowed the seeds of the low-tax, small-state,”
Funny to read this.
From the days of Mises and Hayek the total amount of taxes always increased and the State got bigger every year.
@ Marc Sheffner “how then to explain that their regimes resulted in MORE power for the State, not less?”
Because it were just agendas. On the other hand, it’s my belief that Hayek’s work did influence politics for the better but only in a small way for a limited period of time. The road to serfdom still lays ahead, in the Thatcher and Reagan years we just deaccelerated somewhat, but in their times and even more now we’re making up for that big time.
The connection between liberalization and economic turmoil is an unproved one when liberalization means privatization. The connection is all the more proved when liberalization means deregulation and liberalization of public private partnership or hybrid companies where public institutions still own the stock and these companies have some legal advantages over their private free market competitors. Liberalization then just means just that in the American way: a fascist scheme of (pseudo) private property and government control.
This is what these crackpot neomarxists also mean with market fundamentalism/neoliberalism. Market fundamentalism in the Soros sense means social-democratic states creating more attractive business environments for (mostly) large scale production companies (thereby discriminating SMEs) in order to entice them to settle within the borders of their country. The reason is that neoliberal doctrine supposes that the trade-off between lower tax schemes for these multinationals is positive in total tax income, employment and therefore a positive sum game in sustaining the welfare state.
The combination of big welfare states and neoliberalism is not an inconsistency per se. It’s actually just a ‘modern’ kind of mercantilism, giving out quasi competitive advantage powers in order to sustain government control in healthcare, education et al.
Above also explains the function of such institution as the European Economic Community, now EU, wherein tax schemes and other government things formerly mostly and now less and less under government control is ‘harmonized’; it’s just a cartel of nation states.
In the Gray sense of market fundamentalism/neoliberalism it’s the imperialist spread of democracy (which is more or less implicitly equalized with the free market), a.k.a. neoconservatism which are the most goody-goody boys in the class of liberalism, fascism, socialism (whether or not of the ‘national’ kind). This idea is compatible with Soros’ which makes the accusations of neomarxists et al all the more ironic.
Thatcher was very influenced by Hayek, she once threw a book on the table of a meeting of top conservatives and said “this is what we believe”. The book was “The Constitution of Liberty”.
It is fashionable these days to complain about Thatcher. However, she did a great deal to make the British economy more free. I’m thankful to her that I don’t live in a third world state.
Folks around here are too tied up in Rothbardian dreams of societies that are never likely to be formed to look at the small improvements that can be made.
Regarding Thatcher, real progress was made away from statism under her administration, although in some ways power was centralised and of course, her reforms were not unlimited.
Current wrote:
“Folks around here are too tied up in Rothbardian dreams of societies that are never likely to be formed to look at the small improvements that can be made.”
Bingo. This is especially ironic considering that this web site is dedicated to Mises, who was, of course, a classical liberal, and had no use for anarchism. In fact, in “Liberalism, The Classical Traditon” he says “Liberalism is not anarchism, nor has it anything whatsoever to do with anarchism. The liberal understands quite clearly that without resort to compulsion, the existence of society would be endangered….” Sometimes I think this site should be renamed rothbard.org, in the interest of truth in advertising.
Not at all, Russ. mises.org disseminates material that by-and-large is consistent with the opinions/teachings of the man himself. The fact that many comments on the blog (and some posts) reflect more of a Rothbardian leaning suggest to me that human civilization is evolving to the next level of understanding political economy — beyond Mises, much as those of Mises’ era (the original “Austrians” and their contemporaries) improved on the (somewhat flawed) ideas of those who came before (e.g. Smith, Ricardo, MillX2). These days, such course corrections of Austrian thought are becoming more & more subtle, yet the “mainstream” is so corrupted and programmed to be ignorant that today’s laissez-faire advocates must remain radical.
to russ:
“The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with.”
mises, “liberalism”, page 109.
self-determination, down to the smallest groups – this sounds very rothbardian.
@ “Folks around here are too tied up in Rothbardian dreams of societies that are never likely to be formed to look at the small improvements that can be made.
Published: August 2, 2009 9:12 AM”
I think you overestimate the difference between Mises’ and Rothbard’s political economy. I think it’s smaller than the difference between say Mises and Hayek.
And if one Austrian was truly an optimist it has to be Murray Newton Rothbard. Listen to one of his seminars in the media section, that man was full of energy, joy and humour. I think you share the optimism with him, which is good.
I’m glad you’re not living in a third world country b/c Thatcher yet. It doesn’t look good for the UK just as for other countries, at least you guys have Hannan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94lW6Y4tBXs
Mises was not a Misesian, a statement that has been made many times before. Yes, he was a classical liberal. Granted, he wasn’t an anarchist…but, he was hardly pro democracy or pro state either. His definition of democracy was hardly the one utilized at present. Being thought and ideas a continuum through time, he laid the foundations for other great thinkers to follow without neccesarily being inconsistent with Mises’ original work.
Vamind says: The fact that many comments on the blog (and some posts) reflect more of a Rothbardian leaning suggest to me that human civilization is evolving to the next level of understanding political economy — beyond Mises, much as those of Mises’ era (the original “Austrians” and their contemporaries) improved on the (somewhat flawed) ideas of those who came before (e.g. Smith, Ricardo, MillX2).
Sounds a lot like Hegel, this whole civilizational evolution. I think Mises and Rothbard would probably appreciate that society progress is rarely linear. That is, we don’t tend incessantly more towards freedom, towards progress; rather, on more frequent an occasion than we’d like to admit, humanity has slipped back into dark intellectual periods.
I’ve read quite a bit of Mises, and, being a close observer or politics, am very sensitive to his political arguments. He seems to me dedicated to Democracy because it provides peaceful transition of power, and outright dismissive of anarchy as at best a temporary state of affairs. It goes without saying he was against interventionism.
At any rate, LvMI was founded and is run by anarchists, so it’s not terribly surprising that they rally behind Rothbard (whom I admire, generally, as well).
I wholeheartedly agree with William with respect to his comment on Hegel. Rothbard was especially critical of theories of ” upward and onward” historicist views of evolution. Although, you didn’t mention Thomas Kuhn, he was highly critical of his scientific paradigms on two fronts: first, because it`s not true that once man accumulates knowledge about something, it neccesarily means that he`ll conserve that knowledge for all eternity (there is distinct possibility of it`s loss); second, not all newer paradigms are better than their predecessors were (which in this sense also rules out Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics). I haven’t found any comments by Mises on Kuhn (just in case you know of any) but, both Rothbard and Mises based much of their thinking on cause-effect, so I guess they would be similiar.
Sure, William — of course I never said a word about society always progressing upward in an unstoppable ascendancy. In general, legitimate intellectual progress regarding political economy has been made since, say, the time of Wealth Of Nations or the time of Socialism. As I said in my comment, it’s the “mainstream” that has been striving in recent decades to force society back half a step for every legitimate step forward — people like Keynes, like Krugman, like Moon, Murdoch, and the bulk of the Ivory Tower mob.
Not that it’s all action/reaction, but for sure there are many charlatans out there who would prefer to see society take two steps back for every legitimate step forward — to the point where the ancien regime could resurface to lounge in what they would consider splendiferous global neo-feudalism.
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