I would now like to introduce our Mises Memorial Lecturer, Larry J. Seacrest.
Larry is Professor of Economics and Director of the Free Enterprise Institute at Sol Ross University in Alpine, Texas.
He's a foundation scholar with the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education in New York City,
a research fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California,
and an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama,
as well as being a former fellow of both the Mises Institute and the Institute for Humane Studies
in Fairfax, Virginia.
He also serves as a trustee of the Free Radical Foundation in Wellington, New Zealand
How'd you get that gig?
and on the board of advisors of the Defense of Freedom Foundation in Newport Beach, California.
He is listed in
Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America,
Who's Who in Business and Finance, and Who's Who in American
Education,
The Global Economics and Finance, Who's Who's Directory Online, The 2000 Outstanding Intellectuals
of the 21st Century, The Guide to Public Policy Experts, published by the Heritage Foundation,
and in the 1996, 1998 and 2005 editions of Who's Who Among America's Teachers.
In addition, he has been elected to membership in the prestigious New York Academy of Sciences.
He is a member of the editorial boards of the quarterly journal of Austrian Economics,
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies and the ICFAI Journal of Public Finance.
His BA, MA and PhD are all from the University of Texas at Arlington where his undergraduate
work was in history and philosophy with graduate work in economics and finance.
His research interests include monetary theory, business cycles, economic theory, maritime
history and law and economics.
So I present Professor C. Crest.
Thank you, Bill. Appreciate it.
Well, this is fun.
First, let me say very quickly, thanks to everybody at the Mises Institute,
to Lou, to Jeff, to Pat, how much I appreciate being invited.
One thing is abundantly clear. Both the spirit and the genius of Ludwig von Mises are alive
and well here at the Mises Institute. The breadth and depth of the scholarship encountered
at these annual conferences is indeed remarkable. Indeed, the transdisciplinary nature of much
Much of this work may be unique in the academic world. Mises would, I believe, be enormously
proud of the research being carried on in his name, even and perhaps especially by those
whose conclusions diverge in some particulars from his own.
Guido Huelsmann's masterful biography, Mises' The Last Night of Liberalism, has carefully
documented the fact that this was truly a man of the mind, a man utterly devoted to
and the Pursuit of Truth.
Now Ayn Rand once made an observation that I think is very germane to Mises, though it
appeared in the context of discussing educational theories.
She exhorted her readers to, quote, observe also the intensity, the austere, the unsmiling
seriousness, with which an infant watches the world around him.
And if you ever find in an adult that degree of seriousness about reality, you will have
found a great man.
Well in his pursuit of truth, this great man, Mises, unfailingly exhibited what I like to
think of as dignified ruthlessness.
To comprehend complex phenomena was what was important.
To grasp reality was the objective that fueled Mises's life. Not popularity, not winning
debates, not currying political favor, that's for sure. Moreover, this quest was to be undertaken
within an interpersonal context of civility and even elegance.
Now all that is so alien to our present world. Today, the kind of impregnable integrity that
that Mises possessed is decried as dogmatism, because truth is thought to be limitlessly malleable.
His sort of aristocratic grace is slandered as elitist and reactionary, because so many
collectivists are mesmerized by all things proletarian. His deep concern with the epistemological
The fundamental foundations of economics is demeaned as pedantic babbling, because ours, tragically, is a humane world in which the profundity of the law of causality is routinely brushed aside in favor of the glamour of statistical correlation.
The heroic defense of laissez-faire capitalism is dismissed as being out of touch with reality, on the grounds that, what, that such an economic system is callous, crass, wasteful, inequitable, and exploitative, not to mention insensitive to real human needs.
It is this last issue, capitalism, in Mises' powerful defense of it, as well as both the
grave implications of the common assaults on capitalism, as well as the characteristics
of those assailants that I wish to examine today.
Allow me first to state clearly what I mean by capitalism. Now, it is true that I would
We can shrink the state by more than would Mises, but we have the same broad objective.
I mean a totally unregulated laissez-faire capitalist economic system, one in which property rights are sacred,
where profit-seeking is seen as a noble enterprise, where money is a symbol of honorable achievement,
of being castigated as some sordid tool used only by those devoid of humane qualities.
It is liberalism in the classical sense, of course, applied to the everyday business of
life.
Recall that Mises insisted once, quote, freedom is indivisible.
He who has not the faculty to choose among various brands of canned food or soap is also
Also deprived of the power to choose among various political parties and programs.
He is no longer a man.
He becomes a pawn in the hands of the supreme social engineer.
Elsewhere, Mises declared that if he must compress it into one word, liberalism meant
property, privately held and earnestly protected by law.
In terms of concretes, by capitalism I mean an economy with no progressive taxes, no central
bank, no pure paper currency, no drug prohibition, no gun prohibition, no affirmative action
employment mandates for any ethnic group, no government-run healthcare, no federal departments
of Education, Energy, Labor, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, DEA, BATFE, SEC,
EPA, FTC, FDA, no minimum legal wage rates, no price controls, no tariffs, no welfare,
neither foreign nor domestic, rural or urban, for the rich or for the poor.
You know, a free economy.
Parenthetically, I am constantly amazed by how often I hear people speak of the free
market, but somehow manage to incorporate within that notion the presence of the Federal
Reserve, Social Security, the IRS, ad nauseum.
What part of the word free do they not comprehend?
In any case, I for one obviously do not refer to that tortured, disfigured, tormented, twisted
gargoyle which usually masquerades as capitalism today.
Who would be willing to risk his life, liberty and sacred honor to protect and maintain that
monstrosity?
Not I, I assure you.
If this be capitalism, then what drives so many people to oppose it so strongly?
Indeed, how could anyone find capitalism objectionable once one realizes that it has, even in its
attenuated form, increased the standard of living so dramatically that an average person
now daily enjoys luxuries which hereditary monarchs could not boast of a mere 200 years
ago?
Well, Mises offers two basic answers to this question, envy and ignorance.
First, regarding envy, he declares, quote,
He elsewhere observed that, for many, feudalism actually offered psychological comforts, comforts, mind you, not available within capitalist society.
In a society based on caste and status, the individual can ascribe adverse fate to conditions beyond his control.
There is no reason for him to be ashamed of his humbleness. It is quite another thing under capitalism.
Here, everybody stationed in life depends on his own doing.
Envy and resentment, as we all know, has been condemned by virtually every known system of ethics, secular or religious.
but yet it seems to lie hidden deep within some primitive part of a great many human psyches.
That such emotions are in fact primitive is explored in detail by Helmut Schuck in his famous book
Envy the Theory of Social Behavior. There he explains in memorable terms the mechanism at
work so allow me to quote him because he puts it beautifully. What is decisive is the envious man's
A man's conviction that the envied man's prosperity, his success, and his income are somehow to blame for the subject's deprivation, for the lack that he feels.
A self-pitying inclination to contemplate another's superiority or advantages, combined with some vague belief in his being the cause of one's own deprivation.
This is also to be found actually among educated members of our modern societies who really ought to know better.
The primitive people's belief in black magic differs little from these modern ideas.
Whereas the socialist believes himself robbed by the employer,
just as the politician in the developing country believes himself robbed by the industrial countries,
So primitive man believes himself robbed by his neighbor, the latter having succeeded by black magic in somehow spiriting away to his own fields, part of the former's harvest, end quote.
Well, consider what follows if one couples this repugnant urge toward envy with a broad misperception of reality.
That is, what if one fails to see that all economic and technological progress has been brought about by industrious individuals striving to apply reason to the problems of life?
It is likely then that such progress will be thought of as some automatic gift from God or nature, and therefore that all humans deserve to share equally in these natural blessings.
But what then if one's neighbor or one's employer or some famed industrialist possesses a noticeably larger basket of these goods?
The conclusion must be clear. He must have unfairly appropriated the excess. He must be an exploiter.
Further, the social system that permitted, nay even encouraged, such a result, must itself be corrupt.
As Mises frames the thoughts of the purveyors of this sort of attitude,
quote, capitalism crowns the dishonest, unscrupulous scoundrel,
the swendler, the exploiter, the rugged individualist.
As conditions are under capitalism, a man is forced to choose between
virtue and poverty on the one hand, and vice and riches on the other.
In other words, capitalism does not just evoke sober and reluctant comments about its unfortunate inadequacy.
It provokes vitriolic and self-righteous denunciations.
It's not something like, oh well, too bad capitalism didn't work. It seemed like a good idea.
It's instead something like this. No decent, self-respecting human being can be in favor of laissez-faire capitalism.
It is rife with racism, sexism, the rape of Mother Earth.
It's fueled by avarice. It's driven by malice.
It's the very institutionalization of exploitation.
Well, in rebuttal, one can, of course, correctly describe socialism as the institutionalization of envy.
For instance, Karl Marx famously and explicitly presents the process of economic progress
and its concomitant rise in real wages
in relative rather than absolute terms. He says in his quote from Marx,
If capital is growing rapidly, wages may indeed rise. The profit of capital rises incomparably more rapidly.
The material position of the worker hasn't improved, but at the cost of his social position.
The social gulf that divides him from the capitalist is wider.
It is by such sleight of hand tricks as this that Marx could be confronted, as he was, as you may know, with the fact that British agricultural workers experienced a 40% rise in real wage rates between 1849 and 1859, and yet eerily dismissed this as insignificant.
Actually, it is not just Marxian communism that enshrines envy in its doctrines and practices. The modern welfare state is, of course, guilty.
Schock, again, writing in the 1960s, gives fascinating examples of nations in which its
citizens, driven by envy and resentment, have demanded to know the incomes of others.
Schock, again, quote, The procedure of making tax returns public is found, incidentally,
in Swiss communities, where it is possible to find out, without valid reason, the amount
Out of income and assets declared by one's neighbor or competitor.
There is further in Sweden a private firm which yearly produces a much consulted list
giving the incomes of all families where these are more than $3,600 a year.
And even in the United States between 1923 and 1953 in that hallowed state of Wisconsin
There was a law permitting anyone to inspect any of his fellow citizens' tax returns, with all details and particulars.
Of course, progressive taxation is itself a profound manifestation of envy.
All taxes, by the way, whether sales, excise, income or other, are unavoidably devices of redistribution, as I and others have argued in print.
However, progressive income taxes seem to be the most blatant.
On the one hand, if taxes were a proxy for some justifiable fee levied as a payment for governmental services actually demonstrably demanded by the nation's citizens,
then such taxes should probably be on a per capita basis, not set as an accelerating percentage of one's income.
Or, if the value of the service were related to the monetary magnitude involved, such as protecting property against theft,
At most, the tax should be a fixed percentage of the value, thereby made secure.
To adopt progressive income taxes is to declare openly that the goal is punitive.
As Shoke again points out, envy lies at the heart of the matter.
Quote, the subjective sense of well-being of every income group is prejudiced by the
income groups above it.
In order to be rid of this feeling of deprivation, recourses had to the progressive income tax.
Beyond identifying envy as a key motive for their hatred of capitalism, Mises also offers
an entertaining sociological commentary on the various subcategories of anti-capitalists.
There are, of course, the intellectuals. Lawyers, teachers, artists and actors, writers and
Journalists, Architects and Scientific Research Workers, Engineers and Chemists.
Their antipathy toward capitalism is largely a macro-level projection of micro-level pettiness.
For the typical intellectual, the passionate dislike of capitalism is a mere blind for
his hatred of his more successful colleagues.
White-collar workers specifically tend to suffer from an additional affliction, in Mises'
In other words, sitting behind a desk and committing words and figures to paper, such
a worker is prone to overrate the significance of his work. Full of conceit, he imagines
himself to belong to the enterprise's managing elite and compares his own tasks with those
of his boss. In other words, why should one think highly of capitalism when it is a system
A system in which the CEOs of corporations are granted multimillion-dollar salaries for accomplishing tasks that could be equally well performed by the typical office worker.
Arrogance of this kind on the part of white-collar workers is, of course, encouraged and reinforced by the confused declarations of many leftists.
If running a profitable business required nothing more than meticulous record keeping, then
any competent filing clerk could indeed be a successful entrepreneur.
However, as Mises frequently reminds us, the task of the entrepreneur is far more challenging
than that.
His is a task for the active and agile mind.
Abstractions, concretes and endless alternatives abound.
chains of causality must be discerned and then sorted out. In Mises's own inimitable words,
the entrepreneur must deal with the inevitable scarcity of the factors of production,
the uncertainty of future conditions for which production has to provide,
and the necessity of picking out from the bewildering multitude of technological methods
suitable for the attainment of ends already chosen, those which obstruct as little as possible
the attainment of other ends, in other words, those of which the cost of production is lowest.
No allusion to these matters can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels, he says, and all that
Lenin ever learned about business from the tales of his comrades, who sometimes sat in business
offices, was that it required a lot of scribbling and recording and ciphering. Then too, Mises says,
Mises says there is an intrafamilial phenomenon that plays an important role in this anti-capitalistic propaganda and machinations.
Mises here distinguishes between groups he calls the bosses and the cousins in those families of great wealth.
What are they? Well, the former, the bosses, consist of those few whose entrepreneurial talents make them capable of running the family business.
This is probably no more, he says, than one or two of the Founder's sons or grandsons in each generation.
Wholly dependent upon the bosses are the cousins.
Now, the cousins include brothers, cousins, nephews of the bosses, more often their sisters, their widowed sisters-in-law, their female cousins, their nieces, etc.
The members of this latter group, quote, have been brought up in fashionable boarding schools and colleges, whose atmosphere was filled by a haughty contempt for bonossic money-making.
Some of them pass their time in nightclubs and other places of amusement. They bet and they gamble, they feast and revel, and indulge in expensive debauchery.
Others amateurishly busy themselves with painting, writing and other arts. Thus, most of them are idle and useless people.
Actually, they're worse than useless. He was being kind.
Since they are woefully ignorant of the principles of economics and the daily practicalities of business,
They leap to the conclusions that 1. The capital created by their ancestor must be an unending, self-sustaining fount of income for all his descendants.
2. The greater share of that income enjoyed by their kin, the bosses, who actually run the business, must be an unearned excess.
And three, thus, they are justified in railing at and rebelling against both the bosses and the system they represent, namely capitalism.
The cousins are enthusiastic in supporting strikes, sometimes even strikes in the factories from which their own revenues originate.
They endow progressive universities and colleges and many institutes for social research.
They sponsor all sorts of communist party activities. They are parlor socialists and penthouse Bolsheviks.
They play an important role though in the proletarian army, that has to be in quotes, fighting against the dismal system of capitalism.
Mises seems to have had a particularly low opinion of actors because he mentions them as a species of would-be intellectuals
and then returns to them in full force when he blasts Broadway and Hollywood for being hotbeds of communism
and home to many who are, quote, among the most bigoted supporters of Sovietism, end quote.
His explanation for this fact is interesting, but it hinges on his perception of entertainers as bedeviled by a bottomless well of insecurity.
The essence of the entertainment industry is variety. The patrons applaud most what is new and therefore unexpected and surprising. They are capricious and unaccountable. A tycoon of the stage or of the screen must always fear the waywardness of the public. He is always agitated by anxiety.
This seems a commonplace observation. Alright, entertainers of all sorts are probably very insecure people.
So what then pushes them so strongly toward the left?
Mises' two-fold response to that is that they lurch toward communism because, A, being poorly educated like most others,
they believe the propaganda which declares communism to be a panacea for all unhappiness.
And B, they perceive themselves as hard-working people and therefore comrades of all the hard-working people everywhere.
Frankly, I don't find this a terribly satisfactory explanation.
Immediately one wonders why the same statements could not be used with equal force
to explain the leftist bias found in many particular strata of society.
Why is this peculiar to entertainers? And of course the phenomenon of the
Hollywood commie
is indeed striking. Furthermore, it continues to the present day as we know.
It is not merely some dusty artifact from the red decade of the 1930s.
Note in just the last few weeks, the adoring murmurings that have poured forth on the occasion of the retirement of that cheap little dictator Fidel Castro.
Fame director and producer Steven Spielberg called his audience with Castro, quote, the most important eight hours in my life.
Actor Jack Nicholson characterized the man as a genius.
Popular culture is indeed deeply infected by such warped perspectives as these.
Thus, it would be worthwhile to have a sound grasp of the reasons that lie behind them.
To that end, allow me to offer a modification and amplification of Mises' hypothesis.
But first, a disclaimer is in order.
I possess no direct experience in the world of actors, directors and playwrights.
However, my son is a professional actor.
who has, among other interests, a keen interest in the plays of Shakespeare.
I should add, by the way, to leaven that recipe, I should add, by the way, that he is also a radical libertarian
who was exposed early on to the writings of Rothbard, Rand, Spooner and Heinlein,
which in the theatrical world makes him a very rare bird indeed.
More important for the present purposes, it means that he does not view his craft
Through the Distorting Lens of the Broadway Commie
Well, conversations with my son have illuminated several of the darker corners of this issue.
First actors, and it was an interesting discovery for me,
first actors had for centuries been condemned as belonging to one of the lowest social classes.
Theatrical folk were kept separate from polite society.
For instance, it is alleged that until well into the 20th century, in many American cities,
Deceased actors could not legally be buried in church cemeteries.
And that famed and incredibly charming, in my opinion, journalist H. L. Mencken,
expressed something of this contempt when writing in 1926 he declared,
Men are not alike, and very little can be learned about the mental processes of a congressman, an ice wagon driver, or a cinema actor by studying the mental processes of a genuinely superior man.
Because of this pervasively negative image, it has long been traditional among actors to see themselves as outcasts.
And that leads most of them to identify strongly with the poorest of the working class.
Given also their mistaken belief that socialism actually serves the interests of the proletariat, they automatically embrace the left.
Further, actors think of themselves as avant-garde intellectuals, despite the fact that they rarely can boast of much in the way of scholarly training.
And since the left, especially in the United States, has long been successful in portraying itself as the progressive, enlightened opposition to the bigoted, priggish, witless members of the right, actors gravitate toward the former.
Actors and playwrights are, above all, storytellers, interpreters of the human condition, whose words and gestures evoke powerful emotions from their audiences.
Stories that engage and move an audience are usually tales of conflict, struggle and triumph.
These can be internal stories of personal awakening, or they can be tales of resistance against external forces, injustice, ignorance, corruption.
Of these latter, it is far easier apparently to excite an audience with the stark drama of a poor working man,
Man, struggling merely to survive than it is to glory in the success of a brilliant entrepreneur.
Those currents of altruistic and egalitarian sentiments which are so common in our society
work to sharpen the appeal of the former and to tarnish the luster of the latter.
From Charles Dickens to John Steinbeck, this has been the path chosen by also too many writers
and most actors have reveled in bringing such stories to life on stage and in the movies.
Furthermore, the world view of most actors is apparently heavily influenced by the micro-level environment in which they function.
As my son has pointed out, a group of actors combining their efforts in some cooperative project, a play, a movie, develop powerful communal bonds with one another.
Their work is highly interdependent. The success of each depends upon the success of all.
Moreover, in creating that final product, they may spend most of their waking hours together for long periods of time.
All this is particularly true of live theater, but also often characteristic of film actors.
The result should not be too surprising. Possessed of an intense familiarity with communal enterprises,
actors value what they believe to be that socioeconomic system which enshrines the communal impulse within it, namely socialism.
Finally, I wish to bring attention to an additional factor, one not suggested by my son, so don't blame him, which may be of considerable significance.
It is the Marxian notion of alienation. I believe that many persons, not just actors, succumb to the attractions of this idea, even those who otherwise might reject the pronouncements of Marx.
Recall that Marx and Engels insist that capitalism alienates both proletarians and capitalists.
That is, both lose touch with crucial aspects of their essential humanity.
Workers are reduced to simply being trivial, easily replaceable parts of the industrial process, little better than components of machinery.
Their only solace lies in drugs and degradation.
Capitalists are crudely driven to accumulate ever greater wealth at the expense of a more balanced life, one graced by the gentle delights of literature, family and friends.
In either case, the products of man allegedly take hold of and in a sense come to dominate and corrupt man himself.
This proposition is pregnant with implications for various disciplines, especially psychology and sociology.
Every person who finds his current occupation, or life, boring or unfulfilling, is, unless bolstered by sound philosophical and economic principles, likely to drift toward alienation as an explanatory device, one which soothes as much as it miseducates.
And the next step may well be wholesale adoption of the socialist dicta in whose service alienation was concocted in the first place.
Considering how avidly actors seek to explore the inner workings of the human soul, it is perhaps understandable why movies and plays might turn so often to this prepackaged tool.
Marxian alienation is seductive. Much as Freudian psychoanalysis did a bit later in history, it offers an instant explanation for a wide variety of human phenomena.
And, as long as one does not look too closely at the premises upon which it is constructed, the explanation appears rich with insight.
I wish to emphasize at this point that none of the foregoing is intended to exonerate those actors or other entertainers who endlessly repeat the bromides of that nonsense which is socialism.
My purpose is merely to offer a more complete picture of the motives behind this off-cited connection.
Allow me now to turn to the second prong of Mises' explanation for the prevalence of anti-capitalistic sentiments, ignorance.
As he himself puts it, people are socialists not only because they are blinded by envy, but also they stubbornly refuse to study economics,
and spurned the economists' devastating critique of the socialist plans.
Because in their eyes, economics being an abstract theory is simply nonsense.
They pretend to trust only in their own experience.
But why should there be this stubborn refusal to study economics?
Surely not all the enemies of capitalism are uneducated boobs scarcely able to read and write?
Note that Mises links the failure to study economics with A, objections to all abstract theory, and B, a dependence on personal experience.
In other words, universal principles of human action, true for all times, all places, and all persons, are to be rejected.
In their place have been installed what a necessity must be, an endless stream of statistical applications.
The stream is endless because no one can ever exhaust all the possible particular scenarios.
A new database always lies just around the corner. Moreover, new and better methods of
regression analysis or simulation techniques can always be applied so as to refine and
improve upon past studies. This is not the broad reality-based empiricism of Carl Menger,
but the data mining of the modern econometrician. I would suggest that it adds nothing significant
to our understanding of economics, but it does greatly increase the number of potential journal articles.
It creates the illusion of an advancing science when all it really accomplishes is to flood
the field of economics with a large number of applied mathematicians, and sometimes not
particularly good ones at that, who possess a rather superficial understanding of economic
and no grasp of the history of economic science whatsoever.
Worse yet, they do, of course, replicate themselves, so to speak.
That is, they expect and require their students to approach economics much as they do.
We now have had several generations of economics majors who seem to know less about real economics with each passing graduating class.
This orthodox version of economics described above also plays into the hands of postmodern enemies of reason.
If economics is no longer to be seen as a body of universal principles, which are grasped via the application of deductive logic to certain axiomatic propositions, then a whole variety of concrete conclusions becomes viable.
The door opens wide, for instance, to what Keith Winschuddle has described as, quote,
The argument that Western sciences have no universal validity, but are merely expressions of those in authority within Western culture, end quote.
Now, his primary concern was admittedly with trends among historians and anthropologists, but the fundamental issue cuts across all academic disciplines.
As he puts it elsewhere, this is a quote from Winshettle,
Cultural relativism began as an intellectual critique of Western thought,
but has now become an influential justification for one of the contemporary era's most potent political forces.
This is the revival of tribalism in thinking.
Here is the core issue at stake, I believe.
Primitive tribal thinking is opposed to abstract reasoning.
It focuses on the particular, the personal, the concrete.
It reorients knowledge so as to abandon the powerful processes of integration and differentiation
in favor of the narrow perspective of the clan, the caste, or the tribe.
It leads ineluctably to epistemological relativism as well as cultural relativism.
Moreover, we should note well, and Mises stated it forcefully in Human Action,
that the modern rejection of reason actually began as an attack on economics.
Quote, the revolt against reason was directed against another target.
It did not aim at the natural sciences, but at economics.
The attack against the natural sciences was only the logically necessary outcome of the attack against economics.
It was impermissible to dethrone reason in one field only and not to question it in other branches of knowledge also.
He, of course, here is referring to that beast he calls polylogism and to its progenitor, Karl Marx.
He says further, Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of the mind is different with the members of various social classes.
Racial polylogism differs from Marxian polylogism only insofar as it ascribes to each race a peculiar logical structure of mind, and maintains that all members of a definite race, no matter what their class affiliation may be, are endowed with this peculiar logical structure."
To question the power of reason is to question the value of the human mind.
Once such doubts are raised, abstraction departs through the window. Analysis is made impotent. Education becomes a cluttered attic in which unrelated odd items are piled randomly.
Further, as Mises well realized, human reason is coextensive with human action. One virtually cannot conceive of one without the other. Reason, divorced from action, is sterile. Action, undisciplined by reason, is aimless.
To shackle the mind is to constrain action, to make action teleologically incompetent.
In order to survive and to flourish, man must turn to that one wonderful tool that he does
possess his rational faculty.
Political chains may limit a man's actions to a great extent, but no external constraint
is so effective in hobbling a man as the philosophical proposition that his mind is not to be trusted.
The deep currents of skepticism that have risen to prominence over the past 200 years have in this way gravely damaged the bedrock that underlies economics and further science, technology and education.
As examples of these insidious influences, Mises cites the following, David Hume, the utilitarians and the American pragmatists.
Being concerned about very similar issues, Ayn Rand once wrote of education that it was
a by nature theoretical, that is, conceptual, quote, the student has to be taught to think,
to understand, to integrate, to prove, but that this is precisely what the colleges have
renounced, failed in and defaulted on long ago.
What they are teaching today has no relevance to anything, neither to theory, nor practice,
nor reality, nor human life."
I doubt that Mises would disagree with that sentiment.
I certainly do not.
And those of us who are academics have almost all been sad witnesses to one prominent manifestation
of the default that was noted by Rand, the proliferation of special additions to the
College Curriculum, mandatory multicultural courses, plus whole new programs in women's studies, black studies, gay and lesbian studies, Mexican-American studies, and so forth.
Six decades ago, Mises cautioned against the pernicious effects of polylogism, and now we see that very thing embedded in college mission statements and degree plans.
To his everlasting credit, Mises fully comprehended what some free-market advocates still have not, namely that the debate over capitalism is not merely about which socioeconomic system will more efficiently produce goods and services, nor about which will accord more closely with consumers' individual preferences. He understood that the debate involved that but much more besides. He understood that to attack capitalism was to attack civilization itself.
to attack the role of reason in man's life and thus to undermine the value of life itself.
As he put it with his typical candor, quote, present-day collectivists advocate measures which are bound to result finally in general impoverishment,
in the disintegration of social cooperation under the principle of the division of labor and in a return to barbarism.
Now, if that wasn't strong enough, and not sufficient perhaps to drive the point home,
Mises adds the following crescendo.
In fact, it's the pronouncement with which he ends Human Action.
It rests with men whether they will make the proper use of the rich treasure with which
economic knowledge provides them, or whether they will leave it unused.
But if they fail to take advantage of it and disregard its teachings and warnings, they will not annul economics. They will stamp out society and the human race.
Well where do we stand given that? As we know, socialism is calculational chaos. Rational
appraisement and allocation are eternally elusive. It is a gigantic negative sum game
in which each player quickly grabs a piece of the pie while all the time the pie shrinks
before their very eyes. The warfare welfare state, the interventionist state, is really
and No Improvement. Each intervention begets yet another intervention.
Bureaucracy is the only industry that's guaranteed to experience growth.
Each new regulation taxes the private sector, relentlessly shifting resources out of the hands of the productive and into the hands of the unproductive.
Capitalism is the only positive sum game in town.
I think it fair to say that the case against capitalism is indefensible. It is smoke and
mirrors. It is rooted in envy and in malice, is fueled by a stunning ignorance of sound economics,
which is part and parcel of a broader rejection of reason itself.
These anti-capitalists, these new barbarians, will, if they get their way,
finally destroy not only capitalism, but also education, science, technology, literature, art, individual rights, prosperity, civilization itself.
No, it will not come like an avalanche of snow cascading down some mountainside.
It will be, it has been, more like a stream of water slowly but inexorably eroding the
surface of a rock until eventually the rock simply is no more.
One could say that mankind is slouching, shuffling toward collectivism.
What are we to do?
I would suggest the following.
We can and must continue, first of all, the magnificent legacy of Ludwig von Mises.
We must extend Austrian economics in every way and direction.
We must encourage the application of Austro-libertarian insights to every field and topic imaginable.
We must engage other scholars and policymakers and molders of opinion, both in print and
and in person.
We must educate the public whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Listen, we know the task is not easy.
Let's face the truth.
The collectivists have their tentacles firmly inserted into every shadowy orifice of the
body politic.
We can, we must, root them out by mercilessly exposing them to the light of reason, liberty,
and the Economics of Menger, Boehm-Bawerk, Mises and Rothbard.
In this grand endeavor, we may perhaps take heart from an observation offered long ago
by a great American patriot, Samuel Adams.
He suggested this, it does not require a majority to prevail but rather an irate, tireless minority
keen to set brushfires of freedom in people's minds.
Until that day of liberation finally comes, let us dedicate ourselves to being that irate
and tireless minority.
Thank you very much.