The New Neo

[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.

I read a tremendously relevant quotation from the philosopher and economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) the other day and decided I’d have to learn more about him:

Mises’s greatest contribution [was] his demonstration that socialism cannot function as a rational economic system and that private ownership of the means of production is necessary if value is going to be maximized and waste is going to be minimized in the production process.

…He demonstrated that it was impossible to know whether a particular production process was wise (resource-optimizing) or unwise (resource-wasting) in the absence of prices for the means of production. His socialist critics accepted this, and Oskar Lange suggested that a statue of Mises be given a place of honor by the socialist Central Planning Board…

Mises’s arguments, and the arguments of those who have followed him, do not merely undermine arguments for pure, global socialism. They also undermine arguments for interventionism more generally. Economists take a lot of heat for focusing on market exchange and material prosperity, and it is fashionable in some circles to say that “there is more to life than economic efficiency” as if that decides an argument in favor of intervention. Not so: people respond to incentives, even when you don’t want them to, and the knowledge-destroying and incentive-distorting effects of interventionism all too often bring with them unintended consequences that not only reduce economic efficiency but also harm precisely the intended beneficiaries of the intervention.

Obviously a man to be reckoned with, although even some on the right have felt he was too extreme, and later he become fairly isolated within the profession. He marched to nobody else’s drummer, and had the courage of his convictions and then some. He’d seen the Nazis come to power, and wasn’t about to be cowed by a bunch of his fellow economists.

Somewhere along the line I lost the original quote that prompted me to read about him, but since Mises is eminently quotable I had no difficulty whatsoever finding more of his writings that appealed to me. I don’t agree with everything he wrote, but I found so many quotes to admire and ponder that I’m going to break this post into two parts, in order to give you time to savor how brilliantly stated and apropos they are to today. And remember, most of them are from the 1920s through the 1960s:

How one carries on in the face of unavoidable catastrophe is a matter of temperament. In high school, as was custom, I had chosen a verse by Virgil to be my motto: Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito. Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it. I recalled these words during the darkest hours of the war. Again and again I had met with situations from which rational deliberation found no means of escape; but then the unexpected intervened, and with it came salvation. I would not lose courage even now. I wanted to do everything an economist could do. I would not tire in saying what I knew to be true.

My theories explain, but cannot slow the decline of a great civilization. I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.

The social system of private property and limited government is the only system that tends to debarbarize all those who have the innate capacity to acquire personal culture.

Seen from the point of view of the particular group interests of the bureaucrats, every measure that makes the governments payroll swell is progress.

A government enterprise can never be commercialized no matter how many external features of private enterprise are superimposed on it.

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.

History does not provide any example of capital accumulation brought about by a government. As far as governments invested in the construction of roads, railroads, and other useful public works, the capital needed was provided by the savings of individual citizens and borrowed by the government.

A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

No civilized community has callously allowed the incapacitated to perish. But the substitution of a legally enforceable claim to support or sustenance for charitable relief does not seem to agree with human nature as it is… The discretion of bureaucrats is substituted for the discretion of people whom an inner voice drives to acts of charity.

Since the third century Christianity has always served simultaneously those who supported the social order and those who wished to overthrow it. . . . It is the same today: Christianity fights both for and against Socialism. [That was written in 1922, by the way].

[To be continued…]