Spoken Mises

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Study Guide to Human Action, Chapter VII (2.34 MB)

Paul Gottfried's excellent book lends strong support to a controversial claim of Murray Rothbard's. In his The Betrayal of the American Right (Mises Institute, 2007), Rothbard argues that the American Old Right could not be considered conservative in the European sense. Quite the contrary, it opposed traditional conservatism as an enemy of liberty. Rothbard states his view with characteristic force. He refers to "the philosophy that has marked genuinely conservative thought, regardless of label, since the ancient days of Oriental despotism: an all-encompassing reverence for 'Throne-and-Altar,' for whatever divinely sanctioned State apparatus happened to be in existence." (Betrayal, p. 1). The Old Right of Nock, Garrett, Flynn, and others, was a classical liberal movement, not a conservative one.

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Doomed to Failure: American Conservatism (2.41 MB)

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The Fallacy of Money Mania (1.39 MB)

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Buckley Revealed (719.00 KB)

Garet Garrett, writes Murray Rothbard, had called the shots: in referring to the triumph of the New Deal and then of American Empire, he had summed up the strategy: "revolution within the form." The New Right did not bother, would not rouse possible resistance, by directing a frontal assault on the old idols: on the dead Senator Taft, on the Bricker Amendment, or on the old ideals of individualism and liberty. Instead, they ignored some, dropped others, and claimed to come to fulfill the general ideals of individualism in a new and superior "fusion" of liberty and ordered tradition. How, specifically, was the deed done? For one thing, by hitting us at our most vulnerable point: the blight of anti-Communism. For red-baiting came easily to all of us, even the most libertarian. In the first place, there were the terrible memories of World War II: the way in which the Communist Party had gleefully adopted the mantle of war patriots, of "twentieth-century Americanism," and had unashamedly smeared all opponents of war as agents of Hitler.

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National Review and the Triumph of the New Right (10.90 MB)

The ideal of conscious control of social phenomena has made its greatest influence felt in the economic field, writes F. A. Hayek. The present popularity of "economic planning" is directly traceable to the prevalence of the scientistic ideas we have been discussing. As in this field the scientistic ideals manifest themselves in the particular forms which they take in the hands of the applied scientist and especially the engineer, it will be convenient to combine the discussion of this influence with some examination of the characteristic ideals of the engineers. We shall see that the influence on current views about problems of social organization of his technological approach, or the engineering point of view, is much greater than is generally realized. Most of the schemes for a complete remodeling of society, from the earlier utopias to modern socialism, bear indeed the distinct mark of this influence.

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Engineers and Planners (5.61 MB)

The currently observed turmoil in financial markets, which is believed to have been ignited by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, has recently brought to prominence the ideas of Hyman Minsky (1919–1996), a prominent member of the post-Keynesian school of economics. Many commentators are of the view that Minsky's framework of thinking accurately anticipated the current financial crisis, writes Frank Shostak. While most mainstream economists are of the view that economic busts are the outcome of various external shocks to the economy, Minsky held that, even in the absence of such shocks, the capitalistic economy has an inherent tendency to develop instability, which culminates in severe economic crises. The key mechanism that pushes the economy towards a crisis is the accumulation of debt.

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Does the Current Financial Crisis Vindicate the Economics of Hyman Minsky? (3.67 MB)

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The Semantic Subversion of the Gold Standard and Free Banking (1.86 MB)

On Wednesday, November 14, 2007, federal agents raided the Indianapolis headquarters of a company called NORFED, the National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve Act and Internal Revenue Code, and seized its holdings of gold, silver, and copper, much of it in the form of coins bearing the likeness of US Congressman Dr. Ron Paul of Texas, a candidate for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. The search warrant for this raid alleges fraud and money laundering, and a supporting affidavit refers to provisions of the US Code that prohibit the emission of any coins intended to circulate as money, and the emission of anything in the likeness of the currency of the United States. The details of the case are complicated, but there are two issues that Clifford Thies can address without going into all the claims and counterclaims. How is it that the US government has the power to prohibit people from using alternative forms of money (i.e., the first provision), and how is it that the coins of NORFED resemble those of the United States (the second)?

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The Precedent for the Ron Paul Dollar (2.82 MB)

Like many intellectuals at the turn of the 19th century, Oscar Wilde was both interested in the problems of society and a proponent of socialism. Though Wilde was more concerned with criticizing Victorian society via his satirical works than puzzling over the problems of social organization, he did briefly examine social philosophy in his little-known essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism. Wilde's approach is hardly praxeological — in fact, he assays the problem of socialism from the perspective of an artist rather than an economist or philosopher — but nevertheless, his essay is instructive, and has much to teach about both the confusion of the intellectuals vis à vis socialism, and, ironically enough, about the problems of state power in general. What makes Wilde's essay so remarkable is that, even as he errs regarding his arguments, upon closer examination one observes that he in fact possesses deep insights that might remain hidden to the casual reader.

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The Confused Socialism of Oscar Wilde (2.48 MB)