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NOTE How Ludwig von Mises Dispels Current Myths About Capitalism

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We want to leave some time for discussion and it's 4.25 and the session ends at 4.45.

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So I don't think I'm going to give my whole paper at this point and really I don't mind because my

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main purpose was just to be here and to attend the conference. So I think what I'll do is I'll take,

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I'll try to limit myself to no longer than 10 minutes and just make some commentary

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Now, I was sort of quickly sitting here and watching the time go by, I re-thought my paper

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and I originally wanted to talk about how Ludwig von Mises dispels myths about capitalism,

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but if most of you have read his works then you've probably read this and I have not much

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new to say.

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But one thing that I would like to say is that reading Ludwig von Mises, and here I'm

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I'm talking from personal experience and I'm talking from the heart, not as a scholar.

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It has a therapeutic value.

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And reading Ludwig von Mises, when I read him, I had a healing experience and I understood

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myself better and I understood a lot of my resentments, the envy I had within me, resentments

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I had within me and many other things.

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And I first started reading this author two years ago, so this is a fairly recent thing.

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And I'd just like to make another comparison. On the way down here on the plane, I read

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a book, not from Ludwig von Mises, but written by a psychiatrist. This book just came out

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in Canada about a month ago. It's written by a French-Canadian psychiatrist who has

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many years of experience. He's about 70 years old. And he wrote a book about the benefits

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of smoking for some people. And of course, he says, as a doctor, he says he understands

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is better not to smoke, but in treating many patients he said that people who are depressive

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often they don't know it and they smoke because nicotine acts as an antidepressant and he

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says it's a less worse drug than many of the others that doctors prescribe for depression.

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And this doctor too also said that new research has shown that nicotine stops Alzheimer's,

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slows Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease and these are other topics, we can't

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in the book where he talks about the entrepreneur because he's treated many entrepreneurs in

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his life and he says that the portrait of an entrepreneur, the character of an entrepreneur,

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the personality of an entrepreneur, he says is very similar to the personality of an artist.

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They are basically artists and he says many artists, it's known that many artists suffer

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from depression and to sort of to overcome their depression, they create works of art,

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They write books, they do paintings, they do a lot of things like this.

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And he said he had one client who was an important entrepreneur and he asked his client once,

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his patient, what do you do to get over depression?

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And the entrepreneur said, well, I buy another company.

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And reading Ludwig, so you can see that person who is in entrepreneurial activity, they're

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They're not there to exploit necessarily just for the money, but that's what they are.

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They are artists.

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And the first book I read by Ludwig von Mises was The Anti-Capitalist Mentality.

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That book came into my hands by coincidence and I was almost like blushing when I was

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reading it because I was one of those intellectuals who persecuted capitalists at one time in

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my life.

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Basically, as a teenager, I had read Ayn Rand and I think I was a libertarian when I was

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a teenager, but then I went to university and I was trained by the Jesuits and of course

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they told me not to read that trash and I just, it just, I had forgot about it and also

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I was one of those that was saying, yeah, the capitalists and yeah, they just sit back

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and they live off their interests and it's also easy and I had this mentality maybe for

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for about 20 years until my wife and I bought a little business and tried to become capitalists

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ourselves. And then we saw that it's not so easy and money just doesn't fall from the

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sky. And so Ludwig von Mises in his book, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, in the first

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part of the book, he really goes into, he says, why do people loathe capitalism and

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why do intellectuals loathe capitalism? And he says, first of all, in capitalism, there's

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There's no excuses. In the case society, in former times, in the feudal society, you could

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say, well, I'm poor because I'm born into the wrong case, or I'm a serf or something

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like this. But in capitalist society, all are equal under the law. And we all have maybe

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not equal chances, but we all have a chance to better our lot in life. And he says often

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it's just a lot of petty resentments that two people may start out equally, one gets

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The intellectual class, for example, normally like the universities are quite left-wing or most faculties are quite left-wing, and he goes into a lot of, and this was my situation too, being in a very left-wing environment, I'm a professor of philosophy, and he says, well, like, basically, blue collar workers, they don't really get into contact with the boss or the director.

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The CEO. But if you're an intellectual, you are mixing in higher circles and you can't

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understand why some guy who sells laundry detergent can make ten times your salary.

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And though you figure, well, then something has to be wrong with the system because I'm

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part of the intellectual elite in society and how come I cannot have the same, have

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the, reap these same benefits and have the same kind of life.

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And many other things that Ludwig von Mises teaches. So like I said, when I read him,

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For me it was a therapeutic experience, I understood myself better, I understood resentments

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that I had, dissatisfactions that I had and it was, this is I think rare, rare is the

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writer or scholar who does both, who can give you a lot of factual information and teach

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you a lot but at the same time whom you can read and almost like experience a conversion

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and feel yourself having become a better person or having like made progress in your own personal

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life because of having read this author and I think I'll stop there so we'll leave time

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for the discussion there were a lot of important topics.