Spoken Mises

In the spring of 1970, a new political term — "the hard hats" — burst upon the American consciousness. As the hard-hatted construction workers barreled their way around the Wall Street area, beating up college kids and peace demonstrators, earning the admiration of the right wing and a citation from President Nixon, one of the banners they raised summed up in a single phrase how remarkably the right wing has changed over the past two decades. For the banner said simply: "God Bless the Establishment." The Old Right, which constituted the American right wing from approximately the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, was, if nothing else, an Opposition movement. Hostility to the Establishment was its hallmark, its very lifeblood. In fact, when in the 1950s the monthly newsletter RIGHT attempted to convey to its readers news of the right wing, it was of course forced to define the movement it would be writing about — and it found that it could define the right wing only in negative terms: in its total opposition to what it conceived to be the ruling trends of American life

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The Betrayal of the American Right (8.33 MB)

When did the Ford Motor Company begin to lose its way? Garet Garret, writing in what remains the best history of the American car, says that the problems began in the 1930s, during the New Deal, when the labor unions used government to turn the company from consumer service toward union service. Then management lost sight of the original vision of its great founder. Then the founder himself lost his way. All events since that time have consisted mostly in the slow but sure strangulation of a once-great company. The crisis began during the New Deal and has lasted until now, when the only real salvation for the Ford Motor Co. and the American car generally is a complete revolution that government and unions intend to make impossible.

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The End of Ford: It Began in the New Deal (2.53 MB)

The repercussions of the turmoil in the US subprime mortgage market are increasingly being felt around the world. What was initially thought to be a problem confined to a US credit market segment has increasingly transformed itself into an erosion of investor confidence in credit quality in general and, in some countries, concerns about the reliability of the banking sector. The most obvious symptom of eroding confidence is the alleged "liquidity crisis." The term "liquidity" usually denotes the possibility to buy or sell a financial asset at any one time without causing noticeable changes in the price of the product being bought or sold. Market participants speak of "illiquidity" when it is no longer possible to sell financial products, or if selling is possible only at greatly diminished prices. In recent weeks, a number of financial market segments have indeed become illiquid in the sense defined above

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The Shaking Tower of Debt (1.96 MB)

The outstanding merit of Brian Doherty's book is that it contains a treasure trove of valuable information regarding the events, personalities, periodicals and organizations whose complex interplay influenced the intellectual and institutional development of the modern American libertarian movement. But its merit also becomes its defect in the hands of the author, who appears at times to be completely overwhelmed by the wealth of information he has collected, unable or unwilling to critically evaluate the facts and events he recounts and assimilate them into a coherent narrative. Doherty's abdication of this essential role of the historian at critical points is bad enough, but to make matters worse he enlists interested participants in the movement not only for their recollections and descriptions but for the interpretive analysis that he is so derelict in supplying. Thus, he takes at face value and naively repeats without critical discussion the most absurd and self-serving pronouncements by commentators aligned with one faction or another.

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A Fairy Tale of the Austrian Movement (7.61 MB)

Governments institute policies to either boost population or shrink it. In fact, the population question is like any other aspect of the social order: best addressed by the market. If you took the population of today and plugged it into a pre-capitalist age, there would be mass death, to be sure. Supporting this level of population growth requires free economies. There is really no other choice for us. And what about the future? Where will the food come from to feed all of these people? It will come from development. We now have more food per person than we used to, even though world population has doubled since 1961. Developing populations increased per capita calorie intake by 38 percent. The problem of food is a problem of development. As societies advance through trade, so will the food supply.

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Too Many or Too Few People? (1.07 MB)

Many conservatives have come to realize that the old feisty, antigovernment spirit of conservatives has been abraded and somehow been transformed into its statist opposite, writes Murray Rothbard. It is tempting, and, so far as it goes, certainly correct, to put the blame on the Right's embrace in the 1970s of Truman-Humphrey Cold War liberals calling themselves "neoconservatives," and to allow these ex-Trotskyites and ex-Mensheviks not only into the tent but also to take over the show. But the thesis of the book is that those who wonder what happened to the good old cause must not stop with the neocons: that the rot started long before, with the founding in 1955 of National Review and its rapid rise to dominance of the conservative movement.

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When did the Right Unravel? (1.74 MB)

In 1884, Herbert Spencer wrote what quickly became a celebrated book, The Man Versus The State. The book is seldom referred to now, and gathers dust on library shelves — if, in fact, it is still stocked by many libraries. Spencer's political views are regarded by most present-day writers, who bother to mention him at all, as "extreme laissez faire," and hence "discredited." But any open-minded person who takes the trouble today to read or reread The Man Versus The State will probably be startled by two things. The first is the uncanny clairvoyance with which Spencer foresaw what the future encroachments of the State were likely to be on individual liberty, above all in the economic realm. The second is the extent to which these encroachments had already occurred in 1884, the year in which he was writing.

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From Spencer's 1884 to Orwell's 1984 (4.61 MB)

The man credited with founding Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales — known to Wikipedians as "Jimbo" — was a finance major at Auburn University when the Mises Institute's Mark Thornton suggested he read "The Use of Knowledge in Society," a now-famous essay written by Austro-libertarian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek. The essay argues that prices in the market represent a spontaneous order that results from the interaction of individuals with diverse wants, allowing them to cooperate to achieve complex goals. According to a June 2007 Reason magazine interview, this insight of Hayek's is what led Wales to found Wikipedia. The rather lofty vision that inspired Wales? "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

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Wikipedia: What Is It Good For? (1.28 MB)

Right up to the second half of July, not only were commodity markets strong, but world equities were still raging ahead in utter denial of the spreading cracks in the credit boom, with both the S&P and the emerging markets' indices making new highs in that time. All this despite the fact that there were elevated sentiment readings: record-high margin longs on the NYSE; record-low mutual fund liquid asset percentage holdings; a major turn in the breadth of the market (that for the NASDAQ has, indeed, since hit new multi-year lows); and volatility indices were climbing with — rather than against — the rise in stocks. It is now clear that the sense of invincibility displayed by so many players was singularly ill judged. Far from forming a "permanently high plateau," the early summer seems to have marked nothing less than the nose-bleedingly vertiginous pinnacle of what has arguably been the most spectacular mass hysteria in the whole sorry history of financial market manias.

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Twilight of the Gods (6.32 MB)

How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq. But there's one thing Americans don't talk about: the lives of Iraqis, or, rather, the deaths of Iraqis. It's about time that we think about the numbers. Opinion Research Business, a highly reputable polling firm in the UK, has just completed a detailed and rigorous survey of Iraqis. Here is the grisly bottom line.

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None Dare Call It Genocide (1.26 MB)