The Anti-Capitalists: Barbarians at the Gate

[This talk was presented as the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture at the Austrian Scholars Conference in Auburn, Alabama on March 15, 2008. This talk is also available in video and MP3 audio file.] One thing is abundantly clear. Both the spirit and the genius of Ludwig von Mises are alive and well here at the Mises Institute. The breadth and depth of the scholarship encountered at these annual conferences is quite remarkable. Indeed, the transdisciplinary nature of much of this work may be unique in the academic world. Mises would, I believe, be enormously proud of the research being carried on in his name — even, and perhaps especially, by those whose conclusions diverge in some particulars from his own. Guido Hülsmann's masterful biography, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, has carefully documented the fact that this was truly a man of the mind, a man utterly devoted to the pursuit of truth. Ayn Rand once made an observation that I think is germane to Mises, though it appeared in the context of discussing educational theories. She exhorted her readers to "[o]bserve also the intensity, the austere, the unsmiling seriousness with which an infant watches the world around him. (If you ever find, in an adult, that degree of seriousness about reality, you will have found a great man)" (The New Left, p. 156). In the course of his pursuit of truth, this great man unfailingly exhibited what I like to think of as a "dignified ruthlessness." To comprehend complex phenomena was what was important. To grasp reality was the objective that fueled Mises's life, not popularity, not winning debates, not currying political approval. Moreover, this quest was to be undertaken within an interpersonal context of civility and even elegance. All that is so alien to our present world. Today the kind of impregnable integrity that Mises possessed is decried as "dogmatism," because truth is thought to be limitlessly malleable. His sort of aristocratic grace is slandered as "elitist" and "reactionary," because so many collectivists are mesmerized by all things proletarian. His deep concern with the epistemological foundations of economics is demeaned as pedantic babbling, because ours is a Humean world in which the profundity of the law of causality is routinely brushed aside in favor of the glamour of statistical correlation. And his heroic defense of laissez-faire capitalism is dismissed as being "out of touch with reality," on the grounds that such an economic system is callous, crass, wasteful, inequitable, and exploitative, not to mention insensitive to "real human needs." Capitalism and Envy It is this last issue — capitalism and Mises's powerful defense of it, as well as both the grave implications of the common assaults on capitalism and the characteristics of those assailants — that I wish to examine today. Allow me first to state clearly what I mean by "capitalism." Now it is true that I would shrink the state by more than would Mises, but we have the same broad objective. I mean a totally unregulated, laissez-faire economic system, one in which property rights are sacred, where profit-seeking is seen as a noble enterprise, where money is a symbol of honorable achievement — rather than being castigated as a sordid tool used only by those sadly devoid of humane qualities. It is liberalism — in the classical sense — applied to the everyday business of life. Recall that Mises insisted that "[f]reedom is indivisible. He who has not the faculty to choose among various brands of canned food or soap, is also deprived of the power to choose between various political parties and programs…. He is no longer a man; he becomes a pawn in the hands of the supreme social engineer" ("Liberty and Property," Two Essays, p. 27).      Elsewhere, Mises declared that, if compressed into one word, liberalism meant property — privately held and earnestly protected by law (Liberalism, p. 19). In terms of concretes, by capitalism I mean an economy with no progressive taxes, no central bank, no pure paper currency, no drug prohibition, no gun prohibition, no "affirmative action" employment mandates for any ethnic group, no government-run health care, no federal departments of education, energy, labor, homeland security, health and human services, no DEA, BATFE, SEC, EPA, FTC, FDA, no minimum legal wage rates, no price controls, no tariffs, no welfare — domestic or foreign, rural or urban, for the rich or the poor. You know, a free economy! Parenthetically, I am amazed by how often I hear people speak of "the free market," but somehow manage to incorporate within that notion the presence of the Federal Reserve, Social Security, the IRS, ad nauseum. What part of the word "free" do they not comprehend? In any case, I for one obviously do not refer to that tortured, disfigured, tormented, twisted gargoyle which usually masquerades as capitalism today. Who would