#Ludwig Von Mises

[herejusttosufferalong]

I know politics is a VERY divisive subject

I just want to thank everyone who has been engaging respectfully in dialogue with each other

I really appreciate y'all keeping the space healthy for open conversation

[meli-r]

Some leftists believe that the communist world would function well if "good people" were in charge of it. They fail to realize that, by definition, good people do not want to control the lives of others.

Ludwig von Mises

[theanarchistscookbook]

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Andy Craig at The UnPopulist (05.24.2024):

Though libertarianism as a political philosophy will continue, there is no longer anything resembling a coherent libertarian movement in American politics. That’s because the movement still bearing its name is no longer recognizably libertarian in any meaningful sense of the term. Nor can it still claim to be a political movement, which implies an association organized around not just a consistent set of ideas but a distinct political identity. For over a decade now, since Trump has dominated the national stage, longstanding disagreements have boiled over into a complete schism. There are those who have effectively become adjuncts of MAGA, and some who have gone firmly in the opposite direction, while others took a stance more akin to anti-anti-Trump voices who neither endorse nor firmly oppose the former president but train their ire toward those opposing Trump.

Movement libertarianism has always been a distinctly minority faction in American life, often on the fringes. But it has also had its moments of influence since it emerged as a distinct political affiliation in the post-World War II era. In the process, a constellation of loosely and mostly informally affiliated organizations—of which the Libertarian Party was one—formed what could be called a cohesive, if often fractious, political movement. Understanding this turn of events, and what it means for the future, requires tracing internal libertarian disputes that began long before the rise of Trump. In some ways, they are a microcosm of similar developments in the American intellectual landscape writ large. Not just the implosion of a minor fringe party, the L.P.’s de facto endorsement of Trump shows important currents that will shape the ideological content of both the right and left for decades to come. The libertarian movement may be a thing of the past, but, like many movements before it that have come and gone, its influence—both for the better and for the worse—will not disappear.

From Fringe to … Somewhat Less Fringe

In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard. Though they exhibited substantial differences, each of these figures set out a general vision of what can be called libertarianism (though their attitudes toward that label varied). While other luminaries—such as Robert Nozick and Leonard Read—also made important contributions, most libertarians are primarily in the mold of one or more of Doherty’s essential five.

It’s not surprising that the influence of these foundational advocates has diverged and become more complicated, simply by the passage of time. The eldest of them, Mises, passed away in 1973. Only Friedman, who died in 2006, lived to see this century. Many of their differences turn on questions of economic methodology and abstract philosophy. But these are largely beside the point to the more concrete political valence each embodied. With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognition as demonstrated by their Nobel prizes.

It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally. He was in many ways the most radical—an avowed anarchist—and the most marginal, never achieving mainstream prominence. But he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist. Towards the latter part of his career until his death in 1995, Rothbard took a turn into the illiberal hard right. He branded this proposed strategy paleolibertarianism, a name which has stuck even as its advocates have variously embraced or dropped it. As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.

By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government—an early version of “drain the swamp,” as it were. This went so far as to lament the loss of David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial election. And it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues. Over the latter half of the 20th century, some more right-leaning mainstream libertarians eschewed the more socially liberal side of the philosophy, particularly on issues of race and civil rights. Many were more amenable to the “fusionist” vision of libertarianism as part of the regular conservative coalition. Others embraced the leading edge of the gay rights movement, the fight to end the war on drugs, and other issues of individual freedom. But only in Rothbard’s vision, and those who followed it, did courting the authoritarian far-right become the centerpiece of the agenda.

[...]

From Tactical Bigotry to Actual Bigotry

It was in the fever swamps of the Trumpist neo-right that the Libertarian Party’s demise began. After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.

With this transformation has come an increasing unease with the word “libertarian” in some quarters, especially among those repulsed by the recent antics of the L.P. Though it was never the central pillar of the movement, the party retains the most prominent use of the term. It’s right there in the name, and on ballots across the country. For those who took a dim view of Trumpism, especially after Jan. 6, self-describing as libertarian came to have more baggage than it was worth. In their view, Trumpism was an authoritarian cult of personality, rank demagoguery, even something approaching fascism. Increasingly, those in this group have returned to the use of the word “liberal.” (The UnPopulist is firmly within that camp.) Hayek himself had grumbled that he preferred this term, and that “libertarian” was an ugly neologism arising out of the confused American terminology that conflates “liberal” with the welfare-state left. But around the world, “liberal” retained its more classical connotation, which has started to seep back into American discourse. If everywhere else the term refers to the sensible, socially tolerant, pro-market bloc, why not in the United States?

At the same time, the Trump effect was working its larger realignment of American politics. A minority of traditional Republicans peeled off into the “Never Trump” camp. The libertarian movement was not immune to this realignment along pro-Trump and anti-Trump lines. The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies. Some were caught in the middle, unwilling to prioritize the rise of Trump as a fundamental threat to liberal values above more traditional policy disagreements. But as the sorting dynamic continues, this number is dwindling, getting pulled into one or other camp.

Donald Trump may have helped destroy the relative cohesion of the Libertarian Party and maybe the libertarian movement too.

[older-is-better]

Ludwig Von Mises.

[nicklloydnow]

“The years passed, and the fog lifted, and what had been accomplished could be seen clearly. What had looked like chaos, insanity, self-destruction, the concatenation of unfortunate circumstances, the events whose mysterious, tragic meaninglessness had driven people mad, became recognizable step by step as the clear, precise, obvious attributes of the new life.

The fate of the generation of the Revolution was revealed in a new light, logically, without mysticism. Only now did Ivan Grigoryevich begin to grasp that new national destiny which had risen from the bones of the annihilated generation.

That Bolshevik generation of the Civil War period had been formed in the days of the Revolution; where the concept of the "World Commune" held absolute sway; in the midst of the hungry and inspired subbotniki. It took unto itself the heritage of World War and Civil War—destruction, famine, typhus, anarchy, rampant crime. Through Lenin's lips it proclaimed the existence of a Party that could set Russia on a new path. Without hesitation it accepted as its inheritance centuries of Russian tyranny, throughout which generations had been born and had died knowing one right only—"serf right," the right of the master over the serf.

Under Lenin's leadership that Bolshevik generation had taken part in the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the destruction of those democratic revolutionary parties which had struggled against Russian absolutism.

That Bolshevik generation of the Civil War did not believe in freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, freedom of the press - not in the context of bourgeois Russia. Like Lenin, it regarded as nonsense, as nothing, those freedoms of which many revolutionary workers and intellectuals had dreamed.

The young state crushed the democratic parties, clearing the path for Soviet construction. And by the end of the twenties, those parties were completely liquidated, and the people imprisoned under the Czar had been returned to prison and sent off to hard labor. And then, in 1930, the ax of the total collectivization of agriculture fell. And soon the ax fell again, this time on the Bolshevik generation of the Civil War. Only a small fraction of it survived—and its soul, at any rate its faith in the "World Commune," its revolutionary, romantic strength, departed with those who perished in 1937. The ones who survived made their adjustment to the new times, to the new people.

And the new people did not believe in the Revolution. They were not children of the Revolution. They were the children of the state the Revolution had created.

The new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks. One of the state's concerns, in fact, was that its clerks so often turned out to be very petty indeed, and cheating, thieving types to boot.

Terror and dictatorship swallowed up those who had created them. And the state, intended as the means to an end, itself turned out to be the end. The people who created it had conceived of it as a means to the realization of their ideals. But it turned out that their dreams, their ideals, were merely a means, a tool, of the great and dread state. Instead of being a servant, as it was meant to be, the state had become a grim tyrant.

The people weren't the ones who needed the terror of 1919, who destroyed freedom of speech and of the press, who required the death of millions of peasants—for the peasants made up the largest segment of the people. It was not the people who in 1937 needed prisons and camps crammed to overflowing, who needed the ruinous resettlement in the taiga of the Crimean Tatars, the Kalmyks, the Balkars, the Russified Bulgarians and Greeks, the Chechens, and the Volga Germans. Nor were the people the ones who destroyed the freedom to plant and sow as one pleased and the workers' right to strike. Nor was it the people who heaped up all those monstrous taxes and surtaxes and levies on the production cost of consumer goods.

The state had become the master. What had been envisioned as national in form had become national in content; it had become the essence. And the socialist element, which had been envisaged as the content, had been forced out, reduced to mere phraseology, mere external form, a shell. And it was with tragic clarity that the sacred law of all life defined itself: freedom of the individual human being is higher than anything else, and there is no goal, no purpose in the world, for which it may be sacrificed.” - Vasily Grossman, ‘Forever Flowing’ (1972) [p. 191 - 194]

[epitome-the-burnkid-viii]

[postersbykeith]

[oldshowbiz]

1954.

Alvin Wingfield Jr. was the political mentor to a young Jesse Helms. 

Winfield made the newspapers in North Carolina in the 1950s with his extremist political philosophy, which was widely derided as “lunatic fringe.”

[barbarian15]

"For years, I never really understood this scene.

Thulsa Doom’s answer to the riddle didn’t jive with my teenage mind. Power is brainwashing soft-headed hippies and convincing them to jump off rocks? The answer seemed absurd, or at least incomplete.

It was not until many years later, while studying Ludwig von Mises’ text Human Action, that Thulsa Doom’s answer made complete sense to me. Mises, like Thulsa Doom, understood that power comes from action, and ideas are what drive human action.

“Ideologies have might over men,” Mises wrote. “Might is the faculty or power of directing actions.”

When Thulsa Doom, with a mere word, beckens a beautiful young woman to throw herself from a cliff, he’s showing Conan his power, or what Mises called “might.”

“Might is the power to direct,” Mises wrote. That power, Mises understood, stems not from swords or “steel,” but ideas.

“He who is mighty, owes his might to an ideology. Only ideologies can convey to a man the power to influence other people's choices and conduct. One can become a leader only if one is supported by an ideology which makes other people tractable and accommodating. Might is thus not a physical and tangible thing, but a moral and spiritual phenomenon.”

This is what Thulsa Doom meant when he says it’s not steel that’s strong, but flesh. The person who can use ideas to command people is a person who has true power, true might.

Unlike Thulsa Doom, Mises of course saw power as a dangerous and corrupting force, which is why he opposed concentrating might in the most powerful, and deadly institution in modern history: the state."

[rdsolenodonte]

El capital extranjero es imprescindible para el desarrollo

El capital extranjero es imprescindible para el desarrollo

La industrialización es la base de partida para conseguir una mayor igualdad en el mundo. Pero industrializar sólo es posible a base de invertir capital y de invertirlo bien. Noten ustedes que para nada he invocado un concepto –protección arancelaria– que suele considerarse ineludible cuando se habla de industrializar. Y he procedido así por cuanto creo firmemente que las tarifas proteccionistas…

[meli-r]

What pushes the masses into the camp of socialism is, even more than the illusion that socialism will make them richer, the expectation that it will curb all those who are better than they themselves are.

Ludwig von Mises

[shunoia]

The worst law is better than bureaucratic tyranny.

[toscanoirriverente]

[liberty1776]

Ludwig Von Mises

[dibelonious]

State capitalism/Social democracy failing again.