Ludwig von Mises has some things to tell us [Part II]
[Part I here.]
Some more gems from von Mises:
Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government pay roll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.
Experience shows that nothing is operated with less economy and with more waste of labor and material of every kind than public services and undertakings. Private enterprise on the other hand naturally induces the owner to work with the greatest economy in his own interest.
What distinguishes civilized man from a barbarian must be acquired by every individual anew.
Modern civilization will not perish unless it does so by its own act of self-destruction. No external enemy can destroy it.
It is not true that the dangers to the maintenance of peace, democracy, freedom, and capitalism are a result of a revolt of the masses. They are an achievement of scholars and intellectuals, of sons of the well-to-do, of writers and artists pampered by the best society.
The only task of the strictly Liberal state is to secure life and property against attacks both from external and internal foes.
The concept of a just or fair price is devoid of any scientific meaning; it is a disguise for wishes, a striving for a state of affairs different from reality.
Many of our contemporaries are firmly convinced that what is needed to render all human affairs perfectly satisfactory is brutal suppression of all bad people, i.e., of those with whom they disagree.
Government is not, as some people like to say, a necessary evil; it is not an evil, but a means, the only means available to make peaceful human coexistence possible. But it is the opposite of liberty. It is beating, imprisoning, hanging. Whatever a government does it is ultimately supported by the actions of armed constables. If the government operates a school or a hospital, the funds required are collected by taxes, i.e., by payments exacted from the citizens.
The government pretends to be endowed with the mystical power to accord favors out of an inexhaustible horn of plenty. It is both omniscient and omnipotent. It can by a magic wand create happiness and abundance.
No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result.
Only the literati are enthusiastic about poverty, i.e., the poverty of others. The rest of mankind, however, prefer prosperity to misery.
The intellectual leaders of the peoples have produced and propagated the fallacies which are on the point of destroying liberty and Western civilization.
Man can never become omniscient. He can never be absolutely certain that his inquiries were not misled and that what he considers as certain truth is not error. All that man can do is to submit all his theories again and again to the most critical reexamination.
Lenin’s ideal was to build a nation’s production effort according to the model of the post office.
It is a fact that a hundred years ago only a few people anticipated the over-powering momentum which the anti-libertarian ideas were destined to acquire in a very short time. The ideal of liberty seemed to be so firmly rooted that everybody thought that no reactionary movement could ever succeed in eradicating it.
Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person.
There is no evidence that social evolution must move steadily upwards in a straight line. Social standstill and social retrogression are historical facts which we cannot ignore. World history is the graveyard of dead civilizations.
The incomparable success of Marxism is due to the prospect it offers of fulfilling those dream-aspirations and dreams of vengeance which have been so deeply imbedded in the human soul from time immemorial. It promises a Paradise on earth, a Land of Hearts Desire full of happiness and enjoyment, and ”” sweeter still to the losers in life’s game ”” humiliation of all who are stronger and better than the multitude. Logic and reasoning, which might show the absurdity of such dreams of bliss and revenge, are to be thrust aside.”¦ It is against Logic, against Science and against the activity of thought itself.
That last one just may be my favorite. But they’re all good.
Socialism has always been sold as a religion. Socialism would create heaven on earth. It created the workers paradise in the USSR. People risked their lives to escape from the workers paradise to the capitalist hell.
http://www.heavenonearthdocumentary.com/resources/commentary_socialism_vs_religion_07-14-02.pdf
Great stuff, Neo!
This one:
“Government is not, as some people like to say, a necessary evil; it is not an evil, but a means, the only means available to make peaceful human coexistence possible. But it is the opposite of liberty. It is beating, imprisoning, hanging.”
…reminded me of Glenn Reynolds’ observation — which he says he repeatedly makes in he law lectures — that, by passing a law, you are inherently authorizing the police to kill people for disobeying it. (How could anyone have anticipated that people would die due to a cigarette tax? But a cigarette tax carries with it the police authority to arrest someone for evading that tax. We know the rest.)
It’s thing like this that make Glenn’s proposal — of a new House of Congress, dedicated to doing nothing but REPEALING laws — seem more and more attractive.
“A republic if you can keep it.” Democracy eventually becomes a mob lead by a demagogue and then when the mob is no longer needed, democracy morphs into a dictatorship. History is littered with the dead slaughtered by the mob. We will be extremely fortunate if we escape this fate.
“No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result.”
I think that this quote is particularly relevant for some of the commenters on this site with regard to Neo’s view on the necessity of voting.
“It is against Logic, against Science and against the activity of thought itself.”
All ‘isms’ of the left are, to one degree or another, a rejection of reality.
“Socialism has always been sold as a religion. Socialism would create heaven on earth. It created the workers paradise in the USSR. People risked their lives to escape from the workers paradise to the capitalist hell.” Ray
“When people reject traditional religious beliefs, they merely go on to create some other faith-based schema to believe in; whether it be money or power or the various religions of the left; socialism, communism, feminism, environmentalism or anthropogenicism (the belief that humans are the sole root of all evil and thus are the cause of all earthly problems, including natural phenomena) etc. human nature demands something larger than itself to believe in.” unknown
Personally, I find the connection between atheism, secularism, post-modernism’s premise that there is no such thing as objective reality and the left’s ‘religious’ fanaticism to be self-evident. res ipsa loquitur (Latin for “the thing itself speaks”)
Re: Mises; “Government… is the opposite of liberty. It is beating, imprisoning, hanging.”
Poppycock. Tyrannical government is certainly those things and any government can act in that manner. But a constitutional government loyal to the individual’s “inalienable rights” cannot honestly justify those actions and can only temporarily act in that manner. Otherwise it has become a tyrannical government. And “When Injustice becomes Law, Resistance becomes Duty” – Thomas Jefferson
parker,
The way to keep a republic and, keep a democracy from becoming a mob led by a demagogue is to put an unshakable constitutional limit on government revenues and expenditures. Make it require a constitutional amendment to modify it. In every criticism of democracy, the fatal flaw identified is the politician’s acting to provide the plebs ever growing entitlements.
GB,
There is also the issue of the elitists bribing government to tilt the playing field to promote their interests and put restrictions on their would be competitors in a free, open market. The fate of the republic faces a double edged blade. One edge is the lazy, ignorant plebes bedazzled by bread and circuses; and the other sharp edge is the chamber of commerce – bankster cabal seeking an advantage via regulations to strangle competitors and the garnering of subsidies.
parker,
In my estimation, crony capitalism while reprehensible is not a fundamental threat to the republic.
Some degree of corruption we shall always have with us. It’s manageable but absent constitutional restraint, out of control entitlements are inevitably fatal.
GB,
Entitlements are dragging us down into the debt abyss, no doubt about it. But the influence ($$$) of the big donors (unions, wall street, and people like Soros) along with the msm help elect the master class which promises endless bread and circuses to the livs. This will not end well.
Thanks for this. I hadn’t heard of him, but now he is on my reading list.
parker,
No, it will not end well. But promises of endless bread and circuses to the livs have an expiration date. When they expire, as von Mises proved they must, the livs will begin to awaken to the nightmare that the master class must resort to in order to retain power.
The Left is incapable of governing without resorting to coercion and the more “the center cannot hold” the greater will be the tyranny imposed.
As it all collapses, the livs will no longer be able to deny reality. That is when the elites will realize that they are “riding upon the tiger’s back” with no way to avoid reaping the whirlwind.
A lot of people are going to get hurt and badly. “There shall be much wailing and gnashing of teeth”. Actions have consequences and the greater the denial of reality, the grimmer the price reality extracts.
GB,
I too think the political class is holding onto the tail of a rabid tiger, but I am not so sure the tiger will turn on them. I think the odds are the rabid tiger will turn on the likes of you and me. We have seen this before and we are seeing it now: what do we want, dead cops, when do we want it, now.
Thanks for the great quotes from Ludwig von Mises. He was an exceptional thinker and writer who did yeoman’s work in defending liberty and free markets.
Oh I agree, first the rabid tiger will turn on the likes of you and me, as the elite will seek to use us to deflect blame. But then it will turn upon the elite because as we are not the source of the mob’s problem, turning on us will not make the problem go away and, the entitled are in the habit of demanding that the elite… make ~ the ~ problem ~ go ~ away, as it’s in ‘the contract’ the left has signed with the entitled. Since the problem is endemic to the leftist State, it can’t be solved and in its failure to resolve the problem, the elite can’t escape the blame because there are no more plausible scapegoats.
When the tiger turns on them the elite will respond with force and then the game is up with reality, even for LIVs, undeniable.
The trick will be surviving when the mob turns on us. No guarantees but as ever, preparation is the fulcrum upon which opportunity is leveraged. As for me, I don’t plan on being where the ‘tiger’ can easily find me. Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy and there the Marines have the right of it when confronted with chaos; “Improvise, Adapt and Overcome”.
Loved the quotes and the comments. Let me add another great thinker’s prescience. C.S. Lewis is renowned for religious writing, but he was also a shrewd political observer. His “The Abolition of Man” directly addresses the opening of the Abyss by the Left.
Von Mises. I knew the name and had seen some of his quotes. But I’m no student of his work. However, the quotes listed here really resonate with me. It would seem that no one with knowledge of how free markets are supposed to work and recognizes how they have blessed the nations that have them, could disagree. However, I’m sure progressive minds would be unable to grasp the meaning of the quotes.
I wrote a book once. The protagonist’s life was an example of the American dream. He came up from nothing to success – all through the miracle of free markets and hard work. A woman that I knew fairly well read it and found it to be difficult to understand. The ideas imparted did not add up to her. Only after some discussion of the ideas with her did it dawn on me that she was a progressive thinker. Free markets and a citizen’s ability to maneuver through them to attain some measure of success just didn’t compute because the government, government policy, and government largess were not involved.
If you joined a group discussion with your neighbors in which these quotes were discussed, I believe not many would grasp their true meaning. And that, of course, is the problem we have in trying to keep the Republic.
GB,
I will be in northern Minnesota with my kin and a years worth of food for all of us, plenty of fresh water, 10 cords of firewood, and we will have mucho guns and muy mas ammo. The great thing about northern minnesota is winter; it keeps out the weak. 😉
And, by the end of next summer, we will have another cabin built by our own hands on our communal family property. We will survive.
“There is no evidence that social evolution must move steadily upwards in a straight line. Social standstill and social retrogression are historical facts which we cannot ignore. World history is the graveyard of dead civilizations.”
I continually expect anthropologists to find more lost civilizations, and for Marxists to create yet another.
“No one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result.”
Stay engaged in the fight, but PREP like Hell. I like the family commune, slash, fortress. Wish I could afford to buy a nice mountain somewhere, and had family that were not on the other side of the battle.
Thanks Neo, these quotes rocked, what a mind. Such a shame that our countrymen are so taken with such an evil tool as Obama and his murderous associates.
None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result.
There are no neutrals in this war. I wrote it before and it still applies today.
In the modern day tradition, the Left has another weapon sharpened for the war making.
http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2014/12/propaganda-and-illusion-of-defeat.html
This, in fact, is what the Leftists hold to be their qualifications to make a moral judgment. Ask any of them. They will tell you repeatedly, so vehemently that one cannot get in a word edgewise, that they make no moral judgments, that making judgments is wrong, and that to make a judgment even in one’s thought is wrong – they call this bigotry, because they call everything by the word that means the opposite of what they really mean.
Beware of Leftists. They come armed with a whole wagon train of Death.
Just ran across another great Mises quote, “The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
}}} Only the literati are enthusiastic about poverty, i.e., the poverty of others. The rest of mankind, however, prefer prosperity to misery.
Yyyup. It was openly pointed out in 1990 by a very wise AND smart woman