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Marxism And Revolution

These Are The 4 Pillars Of The Marxist Framework At Work in 2020 America. Ignore At Your Peril.

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Anti-Marxist liberals have labored under numerous disadvantages in the recent struggles to maintain control of liberal organizations. One is that they are often not confident they can use the term “Marxist” in good faith to describe those seeking to overthrow them. This is because their tormentors do not follow the precedent of the Communist Party, the Nazis, and various other political movements that branded themselves using a particular party name and issued an explicit manifesto to define it. Instead, they disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including “the Left,” “Progressivism,” “Social Justice,” “Anti-Racism,” “Anti-Fascism,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory,” “Identity Politics,” “Political Correctness,” “Wokeness,” and more. When liberals try to use these terms they often find themselves deplored for not using them correctly, and this itself becomes a weapon in the hands of those who wish to humiliate and ultimately destroy them.

The best way to escape this trap is to recognize the movement presently seeking to overthrow liberalism for what it is: an updated version of Marxism. I do not say this to disparage anyone. I say this because it is true. And because recognizing this truth will help us understand what we are facing.

The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists. They don’t talk about the bourgeoisie, proletariat, class struggle, alienation of labor, commodity fetishism, and the rest, and in fact they have developed their own jargon tailored to present circumstances in America, Britain, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism (what Marx calls the “ideology of the bourgeoisie”) and overthrowing it. We can describe Marx’s political framework as follows:

1. Oppressor and oppressed

Marx argues that, as an empirical matter, people invariably form themselves into cohesive groups (he calls them classes), which exploit one another to the extent they are able. A liberal political order is no different in this from any other, and it tends toward two classes, one of which owns and controls pretty much everything (the oppressor); while the other is exploited, and the fruit of its labor appropriated, so that it does not advance and, in fact, remains forever enslaved (the oppressed). In addition, Marx sees the state itself, its laws and its mechanisms of enforcement, as a tool that the oppressor class uses to keep the regime of oppression in place and to assist in carrying out this work.

2. False consciousness

Marx recognizes that the liberal businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals who keep this system in place are unaware that they are the oppressors, and that what they think of as progress has only established new conditions of oppression. Indeed, even the working class may not know that they are exploited and oppressed. This is because they all think in terms of liberal categories (e.g., the individual’s right to freely sell his labor) which obscure the systematic oppression that is taking place. This ignorance of the fact that one is an oppressor or oppressed is called the ruling ideology (Engels later coined the phrase false consciousness to describe it), and it is only overcome when one is awakened to what is happening and learns to recognize reality using true categories.

3. Revolutionary reconstitution of society

Marx suggests that, historically, oppressed classes have materially improved their conditions only through a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large—that is, through the destruction of the oppressor class, and of the social norms and ideas that hold the regime of systematic oppression in place. He even specifies that liberals will supply the oppressed with the tools needed to overthrow them. There is a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution” and the “violent overthrow” of the liberal oppressors. At this point, the oppressed seize control of the state.

4. Total disappearance of class antagonisms

Marx promises that after the oppressed underclass takes control of the state, the exploitation of individuals by other individuals will be “put to an end” and the antagonism between classes of individuals will totally disappear. How this is to be done is not specified.

Marxist political theories have undergone much development and elaboration over nearly two centuries. The story of how “neo-Marxism” emerged after the First World War in the writings of the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci has been frequently told, and academics will have their hands full for many years to come arguing over how much influence was exerted on various successor movements by Michel Foucault, post-modernism, and more. But for present purposes, this level of detail is not necessary, and I will use the term “Marxist” in a broad sense to refer to any political or intellectual movement that is built upon Marx’s general framework as I’ve just described it. This includes the “Progressive” or “Anti-Racism” movement now advancing toward the conquest of liberalism in America and Britain. This movement uses racialist categories such as whites and people of color to describe the oppressors and the oppressed in our day. But it relies entirely on Marx’s general framework for its critique of liberalism and for its plan of action against the liberal political order. It is simply an updated Marxism.

Property, Freedom, Peace. To Stand Against The Marxism Of The Left, We Must Be Clear What We Stand For.

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Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism and one leader of a new “national conservatism” project, recently wrote an important and compelling article for Quillette titled “The Challenge of Marxism.” Hazony says out loud what few Western intellectuals will admit, namely that liberalism is not holding and has not triumphed in 2020 America and Europe. We have not reached the end of history.

Our criticism lies not with Hazony’s thesis, but with his particular conception of what liberalism is, what it has become, and what it should be.

Hazony laments, correctly, the expressly Marxist takeover of once liberal institutions, especially “mainstream media, universities, tech companies, philanthropies, and government bureaucracies.” Marx, it turns out, has not been contained to the faculty lounge. Instead an identity-focused variant of Marxism, with new class jargon and new victims, finds support in newsrooms, corporate boardrooms, advertising agencies, arts, and every reach of politics. The rapidity of this illiberal shift worries him, and ought to worry all of us, as it threatens to replace favored Enlightenment doctrines of freedom, justice, and legal equality with rigid new forms of oppressor-oppressed class narratives.

Worse still, the Marxist campaign by definition destroys what came before it. This includes traditions, religion, and an intellectual landscape of open inquiry from which conservatives like Hazony urge us to draw commonality. Once liberalism succumbs to Marxism, and not incrementally, the very way we organize society is cast into chaos:

But while Marxists know very well that their aim is to destroy the intellectual and cultural traditions that are holding liberalism in place, their liberal opponents for the most part refuse to engage in the kind of conservatism that would be needed to defend their traditions and strengthen them. Indeed, liberals frequently disparage tradition, telling their children and students that all they need is to reason freely and “draw your own conclusions.”

The result is a radical imbalance between Marxists, who consciously work to bring about a conceptual revolution, and liberals whose insistence on “freedom from inherited tradition” provides little or no defense—and indeed, opens the door for precisely the kinds of arguments and tactics that Marxists use against them. This imbalance means that the dance moves only in one direction, and that liberal ideas tend to collapse before Marxist criticism in a matter of decades.

Certainly Hazony is correct in his analysis of Marxism’s swift resurgence in America and the West, and rightfully concerned about it. But there is a nagging sense that Hazony does not quite get the antidote to Marxist revolution—liberalism—correct. Yes, an ersatz form of liberalism has failed in the West and appears to be in full retreat. That form, however, is mostly just a vague lump of beliefs today’s liberals hold, or at least held twenty minutes ago. It is not the rigorous and definable conception Ludwig von Mises provided one hundred years ago. And I fear Hazony uses liberalism as a general catchall term for what today’s liberals claim to believe, rather than a coherent doctrine.

This concern surfaced in my 2018 interview with Hazony, where I gently suggested he had superficially misread Mises as some avatar of hyperrational homo economicus. In fact, Mises took pains throughout his work to consider culture, language, nationhood, religion, and intermediary institutions standing between individuals and uncaring markets. To Hazony’s great credit, he agreed to read more and reconsider Mises.

The Quillette article, though, evinces Hazony’s ongoing perspective of what we might call modal liberals. Absent moral grounding in religion, eschewing tradition and history, and hostile to individual nation-states, Hazony’s liberals lack intellectual mooring against the mob. When Marxists come for them, it is far easier and professionally far wiser simply to stay quiet and hope for the best.

This vague kind of ungrounded liberalism explains Hazony’s persistent tendency to take political and ideological pronouncements at face value. Thus self-appointed liberals, from Noam Chomsky to Hillary Clinton to Mises and Hayek, are all cut from the same cloth. If they say they’re liberal, they are. But there is a big difference between Hillary Clinton and Ludwig von Mises which cannot be dismissed merely by broadly terming both liberals or even “neoliberals.” This kind of imprecision does Hazony no favors.

Yet this Hazonyite caricature of liberalism is hardly made up out of whole cloth. It arose in the second half of the twentieth century, and persists in the twenty-first, among the self-proclaimed classical liberals populating many nonprofits, NGOs, media outlets, and Beltway think tanks. It is the liberalism of the Cato Institute and the Brookings Institution, of Professor Deirdre McCloskey and Professor Nadine Strossen, of David Brooks at the New York Times and David French at National Review. These quasi liberals, like left progressives, share a profound sense that history has an arc: everything will get better all the time, if only recalcitrant Americans stop resisting the program. It requires relentless political universalism, one set of rules and one kind of government for everyone, everywhere.

In this view, liberalism is a way of thinking, a kind of enlightened worldview adopted by good people. Liberalism becomes almost undefinable by its breadth: an interconnected passel of open-minded and tolerant attitudes across a swath of “social” issues. Cosmopolitanism, reason, tolerance, feminism, antiracism, and a healthy degree of support for egalitarian democracy are at the fore; economics is not the focus. Yes, free markets and property rights play a supporting role, but modal liberalism is more concerned with human self-actualization made possible only with the correct kinds of left-cultural attitudes. Markets work, they make people better off materially, and most of all they yield the kinds of societies and people liberals like.

The questions for this brand of liberalism write themselves. Do its adherents really think the twentieth century represents a liberal triumph in the West? Has mass democratic voting produced liberal societies? Are Brexit and the Trump presidency illegitimate per se, or merely because liberals didn’t like the outcomes? Looking at the last century, should we count two bloody world wars, central banking and fiat currencies, income taxes, the rise of managerial superstates, vast social insurance and welfare programs, and diminutions of property rights unimaginable to our grandparents as liberal successes? What exactly is liberal, and what is not?

The aforementioned Mises explained this one hundred years ago. His conception of liberalism, particularly found in his interwar books Nation, State, and Economy (1919) and Liberalism (1927), show Mises grounding the organization of society in property and market cooperation:

The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production (for in regard to commodities ready for consumption, private ownership is a matter of course and is not disputed even by the socialists and communists). All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand.

Side by side with the word “property” in the program of liberalism one may quite appropriately place the words “freedom” and “peace.” (Liberalism, p. 19–20)

Here we condense Misesean liberalism down to its definable essence: property, freedom, and peace. There is nothing mushy or fuzzy here. For those willing to read on, Mises provides definitions.

  • Without property we are utterly vulnerable and without agency, standing naked on a patch of earth. The first calorie, the first drop of water, the first stitch of clothing all represent property. What we create or produce from nature represents our will and actions made manifest in physical (or digital) form. Property, not vague ideals of personal liberties or individual rights, sets the stage for all human activity.
  • Without freedom, by which Mises meant independence from the arbitrary state power, we lose mastery over our lives and labors. For Mises, freedom is not some inchoate aspiration or muddled set of conditions to “live your best life.” It is not liberation from worldly wants, from unhappiness, or from social opprobrium. It is the ability to live and direct one’s life largely free of state coercion, nothing more and certainly nothing less. Misesean liberalism recognizes involuntary servitude as a tremendous evil, but it also necessarily recognizes partial servitude to a rapacious government as contrary to our nature.
  • Without peace, man loses his ability to enjoy property or exercise freedom. War symbolizes the refusal of men to deal with one another cooperatively and the descent into an animalistic state of nature. “War, carnage, destruction, and devastation we have in common with the predatory beasts of the jungle; constructive labor is our distinctively human characteristic” (Liberalism, p. 24).

This Misesean program, supplemented with his endorsement of aggressive self-determination and national secession to deal with inevitable political disputes, presents a very different and far more precise form of liberalism.

Would Hillary Clinton or Paul Krugman, both Hazonyite “liberals,” hold property as sacrosanct and argue against zoning or redistributive taxes? Would Kamala Harris or Rachel Maddow argue that freedom ought to include the ability to enact localized abortion or gun laws? Would Joe Biden, supporter of Black Lives Matter, condemn the burning of auto dealerships in Kenosha as dangerous preludes to that most illiberal possibility, namely outright civil war?

Dr. Hazony’s overly broad conception of liberalism as simply the worldview of liberals may render it meaningless. I am sure he would agree that we don’t fight Marxism with platitudes or displays of tolerance; we fight it with a robust and better set of clearly defined principles: property, self-determination, markets, and peace. Mises—not vague platitudes about tolerance emanating from the dying political class—provides the polarity opposite Marx. Mises’s “mere” economics is in fact the understanding of human cooperation and choice in the face of scarcity, and it gives us the blueprint for organizing a wealthy and just society. To the extent conservatives like Hazony can agree with this blueprint, Misesean liberalism is the robust counter to Marxist authoritarianism. But Hazony must give up a significant degree of state if he hopes to preserve any degree of nation.

 

Jeff Deist is President of The Mises Institute.

There Is An Active, Energetic and Clear-Eyed Populist Patriotism That Rejects Exploitative Elites Of Both Parties.

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Populist patriots reject the elites of both parties. They believe President Trump defends their cultural beliefs from the left and their economic interests from the right. They see open borders, illegal immigration and multiculturalism threatening to redefine what it means to be an American, while unfair trade and a rigged tax code endanger their jobs.

The rejection runs both ways. Elite liberals too often talk about patriotism as if it’s a set of blinders preventing Americans from recognizing their country’s flaws. Likewise, conservative elites can be too concerned with boosting gross domestic product, dismissing patriotism as a trifle to be set aside when there are higher investment returns to chase or markets to open.

The divide between these patriots and the left, in particular, is growing. Barack Obama called himself a “citizen of the world” and noted he only believed in American exceptionalism to the extent that the “Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Even more telling was Michelle Obama’s comment that her husband’s campaign made her “proud of my country” for the “first time in my adult life.” One need not perceive the hand of Providence in America’s Founding and ascendance to reject the Obamas’ tepid faith in this country. Yet even Mr. Obama’s arm’s-length embrace of American exceptionalism would prove too close, too warm for today’s progressive Democrats.

They look at America and see only its failure to live up to its highest ideals. In their eyes, this isn’t a country that has provided more freedom and opportunity to a greater number of people than any other; it’s a society hopelessly riddled with social injustices like racism, sexism and classism. Their prescription is radical restructuring rather than incremental reforms.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “Squad” seem to think their criticisms prove their love of country. But even the most fervent patriots allow for improvement. Progressives might be more convincing if they were more evenhanded—spending some time extolling America’s virtues rather than hammering away at its shortcomings. Populists have grown frustrated with liberal celebrities, journalists and politicians they see as insufficiently thankful for the opportunities America has provided them—one reason Mr. Trump’s defense of the American flag and condemnation of Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem have resonated with these voters.

Populist patriots are equally disappointed with the results of decades of Republican economic orthodoxy. Freely flowing American capital builds factories around the globe, raising many people’s quality of life. But this arrangement fails to deliver clear benefits to America’s working class. These voters went along with lower taxes, free trade and other conservative economic positions because they believed, for a time, that these policies would generate more jobs for Americans.

Eventually, many Americans saw enough real-world evidence to doubt that economic vision. Automation and foreign competition led to layoffs, and while some new higher-paying domestic jobs were created in value-added advanced manufacturing, they weren’t distributed evenly by geography or skill level. Cheaper products at Walmart weren’t sufficient compensation for lower wages and fewer hours. Only in the past few years have jobs become plentiful enough to support healthy wage growth, especially for the least skilled.

America’s “forgotten men and women” see Mr. Trump fighting back against Chinese intellectual-property theft, currency manipulation and limits on foreign ownership after years of bipartisan capitulation to Beijing’s perfidy. Rebalancing trade is one of the few policy solutions Mr. Trump has articulated consistently and passionately for decades. He views trade wars the way conservative elites view entitlement reform—as a salutary exchange of short-term costs for greater long-term benefits. And, it should be noted, so far he’s been more effective than more-doctrinaire economic conservatives in advocating long-term thinking. Witness the farmers who patiently affirm their trust in Mr. Trump even as they take a big financial hit from tariffs.

The world-wide movement of millions of people out of poverty has been a remarkable achievement of market liberalization. Meanwhile, for far too long working people’s wages here in America remained flat. And when radical Islamist terrorists threaten the U.S., it isn’t the globalists or glitzy multilateral institutions that defend American families—it’s our fellow Americans, mostly the sons and daughters of the working and middle classes. They’re the ones deployed to neutralize terrorist threats and protect the world’s trade routes.

Populist patriots hear President Trump say “America First,” and think: “It’s about time.” For them, it’s common sense that the U.S. government should value American lives more than the lives of foreigners and U.S. companies should deploy more capital domestically than internationally. Patriots cheered former Rep. John Delaney’s debate line, “There is no reason why people who invest for a living should pay less [in taxes] than people who work for a living.”

Democrats alienate populist patriots with their cultural liberalism and attacks on American identity and symbols; Republicans drive them away with their embrace of free trade and rhetorical emphasis on corporate earnings. Mr. Trump has won their allegiance by pioneering a populist message that melds cultural and economic components. It is the reason he has been able to attract former Sanders and Obama supporters—a feat conventional Republicans would struggle to achieve.

Who after Mr. Trump can win over populist patriots? The answer depends on whether it will be easier for Democrats to slay the Nemean lion of cultural snobbery or for Republicans to muck the Augean stables of economic orthodoxy. But one thing is certain—somewhere out there, a young Hercules is up to the task.

Mr. Jindal served as governor of Louisiana, 2008-16, and was a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

The Noble Idea Of “The West” Has Been Destroyed By Democracy. Time To Look East.

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[This article contains excerpts from a presentation given at the 70th anniversary of the publication of Human Action, in Vienna, at the Palais Coburg, November 23, 2019.]

Mises surely would be pleased by the thought of this gathering today, to know that his Vienna still has a heartbeat in Europe, even as its politicians and bankers and academics all go in the wrong direction. He certainly would be pleased and amazed to know his work would become available across the world, in many languages, free and instantly online. Most of all he would be thrilled to know his name is better known today, and his work more widely read, than during his lifetime. What more could any intellectual or writer want? This alone is a huge achievement.

Yet while even Mises’s harshest critics now acknowledge his influence, they do not read him much or understand him at all. A cursory search of the name “Mises” in the New York Times or Washington Post produces dozens of mentions in recent years, nearly always in the context of some nefarious takeover of government by free market radicals. Who knew Mises was an avatar of neoliberalism, something nobody quite defines but everybody knows is bad? The leftwing New Republic even asserts neoliberalism “emerged from the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early twentieth century.” And The Marginal Revolutionaries, a new book by Professor Janek Wasserman from the University of Alabama, just a few hours from Auburn, claims Mises and his movement “not only transformed economics and social theory, but changed our world.”

When the Left creates a caricature of you, you know you have arrived.

For most of the last 70 years, Austrian economics, or at least Austrian economists, always looked West. This is why, since about the middle of the twentieth century, Austrian economics grew and flourished in the US, while it slowly atrophied in Vienna. It is why Janek Wasserman and others use the term “American Austrians,” with some derision. The Viennese Austrians all seemed to go West.

Consider young Carl Menger, born in what is now the Polish city of Nowy Sącz. His schooling, in Krakow, Prague, and Vienna, took him westward both geographically and intellectually. His position at the University of Vienna must have felt like a cosmopolitan western outpost to a Galician, and his travels as tutor to Archduke Rudolph von Habsburg took him West, through continental Europe and the British Isles.

Mises of course moved westward throughout his life, from Lemberg to Vienna, then Geneva, and finally New York. Hayek too, from Vienna to the London School of Economics, then to the University of Chicago, and even a stint at the University of Arkansas(!) before retiring to the University of Freiberg in West Germany. Murray Rothbard moved from his beloved New York City (where he had been a protégé at Mises’s seminar) to Las Vegas and the University of Nevada somewhat late in life. Even our special guest today, Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, seems to have had a westward orientation. From his birthplace in Peine, Lower Saxony, he headed at least a little West to university in Saarbruken, detoured slightly back to the East for graduate studies in Frankfurt, but then moved decisively West to New York, and then to Las Vegas to join Rothbard. Maybe Las Vegas in the 1980s and 90s was the high water mark, the westernmost reach of Mises’s Vienna.

Now Dr. Hoppe has moved East, even beyond his native Germany to Istanbul. Maybe this is a metaphor for all of us who consider ourselves “Western.” Have we become so accustomed to our conception of the West we fail to fully accept how truly illiberal and intellectually decadent it has become. After all, West always meant “new” and East always meant “old.” West meant capitalism and East meant collectivism or mysticism.

But is that still true today? And is the Austrian school of economics ultimately geographic, theoretical, or sociological? In fact it is all three. We should consider whether, at least metaphorically, Austrian economics now finds itself looking back toward the East.

From an American perspective, rooted in our history as Anglo colonies, Vienna is the East. Even Germany is “Eastern” in a very important sense, because most Americans think “Western Civilization” is synonymous with Western Europe — which downplays Germany’s influence and virtually ignores the Eastern Bloc and its geographic overlap with the former Habsburg Empire. Our great friend and philosopher David Gordon points out historian Jonathan Clark’s book titled Our Shadowed Present, which examines the relationship between Britain and Europe. Clark contends, and David agrees, that Cold War intellectuals purposely used “the West” to shift focus away from the central role of Germany in European history.

But today the concept of East and West are metaphoric as much as geographic.

Maybe we need to turn back toward Vienna, toward the Balkans, the Baltics, the former Eastern Bloc, and even toward Asia to find people interested in what makes a free and prosperous society. We cannot ignore how sad, tired, and addled the West has become. We cannot ignore how many in the West simply no longer care about what makes us rich, or even worse imagine wealth will continue to manifest itself all around us regardless of incentives or state depredations. This is why we see the rise of candidates like Elizabeth Warren and growing support for socialism among the young across America and Europe.

Many in the West simply have given up.

The great investor and fan of Austrian economics Jimmy Rogers says that young people seeking their fortune in 1900 moved West to America, while young people seeking their fortune in 2000 moved East to Asia — which is why he raises his children in Singapore. Of course recent events in Hong Kong show the terrible reality of Chinese state authoritarianism, but the people of the East in the twenty-first century want to get rich, to build wealth, to enjoy all the material comforts of the West — while the West is reduced to socialist schemes for redistribution of already existing wealth. The West consumes capital created by our grandparents, the East builds capital for their grandchildren.

As an aide, China is perhaps the fastest growing market for interest in Austrian economics. We constantly receive requests for materials from Chinese professors who teach at universities we have never heard of, in cities of five or ten million people which are scarcely known in the West.

Consider these questions about people in the East and people in the West: who saves and invests more of their income? Who buys more gold? (in fact the Chinese, Turks, Russians, Indians). Who seeks meaningful and rigorous education for their children, not hyphenated-studies? Who is clear-eyed about human nature, and who is starry-eyed? Who puts more emphasis on family, or even wants children? Who is building, with long time horizons, and who is merely consuming?

Where does Mises’s vision resonate most strongly today?

It has been 70 years since Human Action, but 100 years since Nation, State, and Economy and nearly that long since Liberalism. In those two relatively short texts Mises almost  literally laid out a blueprint for Western governments to enjoy prosperity and peace in the aftermath of the Great War.

Dr. Joe Salerno describes Mises’s program as “liberal nationalism,” a recognition of nation states but rooted in property and rigorous self-determination at home — even to the point of allowing secession for political, linguistic, or ethnic minorities. Misesian liberal nationalism requires laissez-faire at home, robust free trade with neighbors to avoid the tendency toward autarky, and non-interventionist foreign policy to avoid the tendency toward war and empire.

We can only imagine what the West might look like today if those books had been read and absorbed at the time. If western governments had been even somewhat reasonable over the past century: consuming, say, only 10 or 15 percent of private wealth in taxes; maintaining reasonable currencies backed by gold; mostly staying out of education, banking, and medicine; and most of all avoiding supra-national wars and military entanglements, we might still live in a gilded age like pre-war Vienna — but with the unimaginable benefits of today’s technology and material advances.

But liberalism didn’t hold. It didn’t hold in the West, or anywhere else. It never took root in the full Misesian sense anywhere, and never took root anywhere for long. That’s why all of us are here today. If the world had listened to Mises, even somewhat — if western states had committed to his prescription of sound money, markets, and peace, libertarian and anarcho-capitalist theory might have been unnecessary. We might merely grumble about the state, instead of seeing it as an existential threat to civilization.

The flaw in the Misesian liberal program was democratic voting, something obvious to us in hindsight but hardly obvious a century ago in to a Europe emerging from monarchy. From Mises’s perspective, democracy held the promise of liberation from aristocracy. He saw democracy as the mechanism for peaceful transfers of political power, and while this has proven somewhat true, it certainly has not been uniformly true since the interwar years in which he wrote. Democracy did not prevent Franco or Hitler or Tito, and we need only look at Brexit and Trump to see the limits of democratic wrong guy consensus or wrong cause wins. Turns out “we” don’t really believe in democracy after all.

But more importantly, we now understand how democratic voting necessarily and inexorably erodes property rights. Politicians and their electorates benefit from high time preference, from living today at the expense of tomorrow — not only through government spending, debt, and borrowing, but also through artificially low interest rates, all courtesy of central bank policies so crazed not even the prescient Mises would recognize them as banking practices today. Voters and the political class in a liberal democracy have all the wrong incentives, and thus any liberal program conducted through mass democratic voting contains the seeds of its own destruction. Property and laissez-faire cannot survive democracy for long.

So while Mises’s liberalism provided a profound and underappreciated blueprint for the West, it didn’t hold. We have to accept this and grapple with this. Western governments could have chosen to leave people alone, they did not. They could have chosen sound money, they chose political fiat. They could have chosen peace, they chose entanglements. The next time a supposed “classical liberal” — an artificial term, as our friend David Gordon explains — criticizes the excesses of Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist theory, or bemoans breakaway movements like Brexit, or attacks AFD in Germany or Orban in Hungary, or is appalled by Trump and anti-globalist populism — remind them that these developments happened as reactions to the failures of bastardized Western liberalism. Elites in the twentieth century failed us, on every front: war and peace, money and banking, medicine, education. And they have the temerity to wonder why populists gain support?

The West didn’t listen to Mises, so it got Rothbard and Hoppe!

If liberal democracy has failed to defend property, liberty, and peace in the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries, it is entirely justified to consider what should replace it. Of course, the Left offers no help because its program of statism, egalitarianism, positive rights, and identity politics is totally illiberal in design and practice. Meanwhile the Right offers only a jumbled mix of constitutionalism, “limited government,” and “rule of law,” while largely sharing progressive ends but advocating slightly different means. Both share the neoconservative foreign policy of US hegemony and occupation — also known as democratic nation-building.

Therefore it is up to us to create a vision for the present age. It is up to us to reconsider Misesian liberal nationalism for the twenty-first century. Not an easy task, but we have the benefit of hindsight. We know what civilization and society require, and must avoid, because we have the twentieth century to learn from. We also have the work of Rothbard and Hoppe, post-Mises, to guide us and correct us.

What does a twenty-first century Misesian program look like, as supplemented by Rothbard and Hoppe?

  • First, it recognizes nation is not necessarily state; the former can coalesce organically while the latter is always artificial;
  • It is rooted in property and markets, rejecting the utopian virus of egalitarianism that animates the Left;
  • It advocates for smaller, decentralized entities — entities more like Liechtenstein or Switzerland and less like Germany or the US, with democratic mechanisms strictly limited to local councils and local matters;
  • It permits breakaway entities for any group or minority;
  • Beyond this, it advocates fully private communities along Hoppean lines;
  • In particular, it demands private provision of education, medicine, and retirement pensions;
  • It rejects central banking in favor of private, competitive money and banking — so no monetary hedonism is possible;
  • It is strictly non-interventionist and rejects any standing military; and
  • finally, for its own self-preservation, the twenty-first century Misesian model encourages and nurtures the vital intermediary institutions of society, including faith and family, and rejects libertine culture. It thus recognizes human nature, and acknowledges the need for internal governance to reduce the need for external governance. It encourages real culture over pop culture, intellectualism over anti-intellectualism, truth and beauty over mindless pursuits, and real liberal arts education, including history and classical languages, over modern curricula and dumbed-down hyphenated studies.

In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, our revolution is paleo, not neo. It takes its cues from Vienna, and finds its origins in a better, older Misesian worldview. It increasingly looks East, not West to the failing and sclerotic thinking of Frankfurt or Brussels or London or New York or Washington DC. It is localist and decentralist, not globalist. And it places property front and center in the liberal program, as Mises did 100 years ago.

Liveblogging Mises’ Economic Classic, “Liberalism”

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Having set a goal to read all the economic classics I never got around to, Mises’ Liberalism was high on my reading list. Utterly exhausted yet intrigued after liveblogging F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, I was ready for a change of writing style while still exploring the roots of classical liberalism.

In the introduction of his work, Liberalism Mises beautifully explains a few things liberalism is and a few things it is not. Specifically, he touches on the role material welfare plays in classical liberalism.

Since many tend to associate free market liberalism with greed and an emphasis on material wealth, he explains that liberalism “does not promise men happiness and contentment, but only the most abundant possible satisfaction of all those desires that can be satisfied by the things of the outer world.”

Unlike other schools of economic thought that appeal solely to emotions when crafting policy, true liberalism seeks to abolish the causes of suffering, rather than the “suffering” itself. After all, the suffering is merely a symptom of a greater problem. Speaking to this Mises writes:

“All that social policy can do is to remove the outer causes of pain and suffering; it can further a system that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and houses the homeless. Happiness and contentment do not depend on food, clothing, and shelter, but, above all, on what a man cherishes within himself.”

And this is the true beauty of liberalism. While the government may shelter, clothe, and feed many through the welfare system, none of these items adequately help an individual truly pursue what makes them happy nor will it satisfy the longings of their soul.

A lack of clothing, food, and shelter are not solved by the welfare state’s existence. Likewise, an individual’s future will not be secured simply because the government gives them temporary comforts. For a person’s life to really be improved or successful, they must be free to pursue their own passions absent government intervention.

As Mises writes:

“We can only ask them to let us go our way undisturbed, just as we do not hinder them from getting to heaven in their own fashion. Let them shut themselves up in their cells, away from men and the world, in peace. The overwhelming majority of our contemporaries cannot understand the ascetic ideal. But once one rejects the principle of the ascetic conduct of life, one cannot reproach liberalism for aiming at outer well-being.”

Rationalism

Another misconception held by opponents of true liberalism is the focus on rational thinking.

As Mises points out:

“Liberalism is usually reproached, besides, for being rationalistic. It wants to regulate everything reasonably and thus fails to recognize that in human affairs great latitude is, and, indeed, must be, given to feelings and to the irrational generally—i.e., to what is unreasonable.”

Liberalism may always be rational, but human beings are not perfectly wise, and this is perfectly consistent with liberalism. As Mises says, “Liberalism does not say that men always act intelligently, but rather that they ought, in their own rightly understood interest, always to act intelligently.”

Many intelligent people smoke even though it is bad for their health. Mises comments on this phenomenon saying, “‘I want to do what is harmful for my health even though it may be unreasonable,’ hardly anybody would regard his conduct as commendable.”

And yet, policymakers do this all the time. They champion folly by protecting it through legislation. They promise a safety net for ill-conceived choices rather than letting natural consequences serve as a teacher.

But liberalism most certainly does not ignore the flaws inherent to the human race. Instead, it understands that human nature is what it is and individuals frequently act in ways antithetical to their own ends. But instead of merely sugarcoating it and making excuses for irrational thinking, liberalism asks individuals to take responsibility for their behavior.

By noting how we are frequently imprudent actors, we can correct and cater our choices to more desirable ends. Mises says, “Liberalism is not a completed doctrine or a fixed dogma. On the contrary: it is the application of the teachings of science to the social life of man.”

The Aim of Liberalism

Critics like to accuse classical liberals of only looking out for the interests of certain wealthy groups. However, this is simply not the case. When liberalism is examined through the lens of history we see that it was the only ideological school of thought that sought to lift all of mankind to higher standards of living.

Many will juxtapose classical liberalism with socialism claiming that the latter is the only ideology which really aims at helping all of mankind. But Mises knew better.

He writes:

“Historically, liberalism was the first political movement that aimed at promoting the welfare of all, not that of special groups. Liberalism is distinguished from socialism, which likewise professes to strive for the good of all, not by the goal at which it aims, but by the means that it chooses to attain that goal.”

Continuing with this theme he says:

“Liberalism is not a policy in the interest of any particular group, but a policy in the interest of all mankind. It is, therefore, incorrect to assert that the entrepreneurs and capitalists have any special interest in supporting liberalism.”

The real aim of liberalism then, is to improve the lives of all individuals by letting them create value by living their lives according to the dictates of their own conscience. Liberalism allows individuals to plan for their own lives, instead of letting the state do it in their stead.

Liberalism is the reason why mankind has had access to groundbreaking innovations that have increased life spans, reduced global poverty, and made our lives more convenient along the way.

As Mises writes:

“In order to appreciate what liberalism and capitalism have accomplished, one should compare conditions as they are at present with those of the Middle Ages or of the first centuries of the modern era.”

Anti-liberalism promotes policies that would cause society to regress toward more primitive conditions. It is ironic then that today’s anti-liberal “liberals” call themselves “progressive.”

liberalism, classical liberalism, individualism

It’s Time to Reclaim the Meaning of Liberalism

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Liveblogging F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was a journey unlike many others. While it may sound like hyperbole, I can say with full certainty that I learned more from Hayek’s critically acclaimed book than I did from my undergrad economics courses.

Intrigued by the wisdom I gained and determined to keep momentum and excitement for reading economic texts, I made the decision to tackle another economic philosopher: Ludwig von Mises.

Human Action may have been the most commonly chosen work of Mises to jump right into, I decided instead on another one of his classics. As someone who tends to to take a more radical view of classical liberalism than the great F.A. Hayek, I decided that in order to fully understand Mises’ take on the matter, I would have to go to the source. And this is what led me to the decision to tackle Liberalism.

To anyone familiar only with the modern meaning of the term liberalism, they may think it synonymous with “progressive.” Yet, nothing could be farther from the truth. Liberalism has been hijacked in many capacities and distorted to mean something contrary to its origins. 19th century liberalism, the kind proclaimed by philosophers like Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, and Ludwig von Mises is about the freedom to live without government constraint.

Today, it is typically associated with those who advocate for government intervention in almost every aspect of their lives. But the time has come to reclaim this term and restore it to its original meaning.

Reclaiming Liberalism

While we have experienced varying degrees throughout history, true liberalism has actually never existed. Mises recognized this in the introduction of his book when he says:

“Only with some exaggeration can one say that the world once lived through a liberal era. Liberalism was never permitted to come to full fruition.”

And yet, even with these lighter versions of liberalism, the world was able to achieve more for humanity than any other construct known to man. Thanks to liberalism, a human was no longer bound to the conditions of his birth. Anyone with a dream, talent, and perseverance was able to pursue his own happiness and create value as he saw fit.

This phenomenon that allowed mankind to be in control of their own fate also allowed men to create in ways that were not thought of before. And because of these market innovations, infant mortality rates decreased, material wealth increased, and education became accessible to more people.

Liberalism broke the chains that had bound mankind to dependency for centuries. As Mises says thanks to the spread of liberal ideas, “The barriers that had in earlier ages separated lords and serfs had fallen.”

But instead of liberalism being associated with self-sufficiency and the ability of human beings to live free from arbitrary state regulation, liberalism has now been associated with those who call for extreme government intervention.

In fact, those who have now adopted the title of “liberal” are anything but. Instead of advocating for a market that organically and spontaneously functions based on demand, these modern “liberals” call for governments to “level the playing field.”

It is for this reason that reading Mises’ Liberalism today is so important. Before the term “liberal” can be properly understood, it needs to be reexamined by studying its roots. Liberalism changed the world, but to understand how it was able to do so, we need to ensure that its rightful definition is restored.

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