An argument could be made that this past presidential election, like so many others that did not involve Ronald Reagan, was not so much a choice between a liberal and a conservative as much as what authors such as Jonah Goldberg and my predecessor at Accuracy in Academia Dan Flynn might term a contest between feminine and masculine progressives. Accordingly, we have to dig into the past to see how we came to this impasse.
“Man is not a being that, on the one hand, has an economic side and, on the other hand, a political side, with no connection between the two,” Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) wrote. “In fact, what is called the decay of freedom, of constitutional government and representative institutions is the consequence of the radical change in economic and political ideas.”
“The political events are the inevitable consequence of the change in economic policies.” Herr von Mises was the founder of the free-market Austrian school of economics.
He uttered these thoughts in a series of lectures given in 1959, the year of my birth. “Under interventionist ideas, it is the duty of government to support, to subsidize, to give privileges to special groups,” von Mises stated. “The idea of the eighteenth-century statesmen was that the legislators had special ideas about the common good.”
“But what we have today, what we see today in the reality of political life, practically without any exception, in all the countries of the world where there is not simply communist dictatorship, is a situation where there are no longer real political parties in the old classical sense, but merely pressure groups.”
Remarkably, von Mises delivered these remarks years before the first billion-dollar-bailout of an industry by the federal government had even occurred. Moreover, the von Mises Institute reprinted this collection of essays, and excerpted the one referenced above, in its Free Market newsletter in 2006, before the first trillion dollar bailout by the feds had transpired.
“In the United States there is still a Republican Party and a Democratic Party, but in each of these parties there are pressure group representatives,” von Mises observed. “These pressure group representatives are more interested in cooperation with representatives of the same pressure group in the opposing party than with the efforts of fellow members in their own party.”
It probably would not have surprised von Mises to see both parties’ presidential candidates suspending their campaigns and returning to their Senate seats to bail out Wall Street this year. He would also not likely be too shocked to see that the people who write about such matters in the Academy and the popular press still can’t buy a clue no matter how rich they are.
“For years, people throughout the world have been writing about democracy—about popular representative government,” von Mises noted. “They have been complaining about its inadequacies, but the democracy they criticize is only that democracy under which interventionism is the governing policy of the country.”
In like fashion, you don’t need a séance to realize that the Austrian scholar could have foreseen America’s current indebtedness. The orgy of government spending taking place under an allegedly Republican presidential administration would not have stunned him either.
“The system leads also to a constant increase of public expenditures, on the one hand, and makes it difficult, on the other, to levy taxes,” stated von Mises. “These pressure group representatives want many special privileges for their pressure groups, but do not want to burden their supporters with a too heavy tax load.”
As von Mises pointed out, such a system is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Conversely, such a leviathan state is what killed ancient Rome.
The topical criticisms von Mises delivered in the 1950s look startlingly clairvoyant, especially in comparison to the outpouring from the academia that never gave him the credit he deserves, a trend he might have anticipated even then. “All these bad ideas from which we suffer today, which have made our policies so harmful, were developed by academic theorists,” he said.
That’s a conclusion you can pretty much slap on every decade. Luckily for Western Civilization, von Mises not only left behind great ideas but star pupils whom he passed them onto and their students and those whom they have mentored.
For example, one of von Mises’s charges was the premier journalist and historian M. Stanton Evans. One of Evans’ apprentices, in turn, was Troy University journalism prof. Chris Warden.
Warden, the former editorial page editor of Investor’s Business Daily, is the author of Accuracy in Academia’s textbook, Voodoo Anyone?: How to understand economics without really trying.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
