The Philosophical State-Worshipper: "...if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it."

"So what is real freedom to [the German philosopher] Hegel?
    “'It must further be understood [claims Hegel] that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.'
    "In the broader context of Hegel’s philosophy, human history is governed by the necessary working out of the Absolute. The Absolute—or God, or Universal Reason, or the Divine Idea—is the actual substance of the universe, and its developmental processes are everything that is. 'God governs the world; the actual working of his government—the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World.'
    "The State, to the extent that it participates in the Absolute, is God’s instrument for achieving his purposes. 'The State,' accordingly, 'is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth... One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.'
    "In such worship, Hegel believed, we find our real freedom....
    "And again, just in case we have missed Hegel’s point: 'A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole.' And again echoing Rousseau: 'Hence, if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it'.”

~ Stephen Hicks expounding Hegel's disastrous (and influential!) statism, in his post 'Hegel on Worshipping the State' [excerpted from Hicks's 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]

The Killer Had An Ideology

Guest post by Jeffrey Tucker

“Sir Oswald Mosley is the person from history closest to my own beliefs.” These are the words of the bloody murderer in Christchurch who has shocked the world with gore and reminded us all of the presence of profound evil in our world. It should also remind us of the murderous power of malevolent ideology. Ideology is a force in our world that can and does overcome every theory of decency and morality.

To deconstruct the killer’s ideology, it is best to begin with his own recommendation. Sir Oswald Mosley (1896-1980) was in some ways a clownish figure in interwar English politics, a former Tory MP and Labour Party minister, a displaced member of a once-powerful aristocratic class who warmed to fascist ideology and Hitlerian politics. Speaking in parks and rallying his followers in dingy basements, he never tired of whipping up demographic panic, calling for dictatorship, and raging against the race-mixing enabled by modern commercial life.

As events unfolded and Nazism was revealed to be a murderous racial cult bent on the construction of an industrialised killing machine, Mosley was run out of the country and his organisation banned. He died in disgraced obscurity in Paris.

The ideology Mosley represented, however, lives on, and remains as exterminationist and deadly now as it was in the interwar years. In the sweep of fascist history, Mosley was a spectacle. He continues life as a folk hero among a certain set of deranged but dedicated opponents of liberalism, along with other popularisers of Hitlerian theory like George Lincoln Rockwell in the United States.

I’ve read the killer’s 87-page manifesto, posted just before the mass murder began. Yes, it celebrates Mosley. It also invokes every trope of what is called alt-right politics, or what is more precisely identified as right-wing Hegelian collectivism, complete with its tribalism, longing for control, exterminationist aspirations, anti-capitalism, and panic about birth rates (the anarchy of human reproduction terrifies them). Even his supposed love of nature and the environment has precedent in certain brands of fascist politics (right Hegelians believe that the commercial use of natural resources is dysgenic).

It’s a long tradition of thought, one born in reaction against the progress of liberalism in the early 19th century. The ideology built a bit at a time over the decades (in parallel to the other anti-liberal tradition of Marxism), rolling out objections to core beliefs of the modern world that were breaking down tribal barriers, blurring class distinctions, increasing contacts between peoples, and diminishing government power and the influence of leaders.

In the mid-19th century, the reigning king of proto-fascist thought was Thomas Carlyle, who decried the end of slavery, the rise of free trade, and the dethronement of great leaders. He despised capitalism but didn’t consider himself a socialist or communist; he was instead a nationalist and reactionary. He set the stage for the rise and persistence of a new ideology of control that was reactionary and revanchist at its core. It demanded back (what it imagined to be) the old world of hierarchy, separation, and elite control of resources.

The forces of reaction built over time. It was, as I’ve written, contributed to by the protectionist Friedrich List, the romantic Luddite John Ruskin, the reactionary Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the fashionable race theorist Frederick Hoffman, the Darwinian preservationist Madison Grant, the eugenicist Charles Davenport, the IQ theorist Henry Goddard, the communist turned Nazi philosopher Werner Sombart, the officious puritan misogynist Edward A. Ross, the brooding historicist Oswald Spengler, the anti-Semitic poet Ezra Pound, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the radio populist priest Charles Edward Coughlin, the pretend-baron and violence worshiping Julius Caesar Evola, the jailed millenarian Francis Parker Yockey, and so many more.

What unites all their views is a worship of power, the sacralising of violence, the dismissal of individual choice, the loathing of the cooperative commercial society, and the adoration of the state. Of course one name stands out in the 20th century as their martyr and hero.

Despite the vanquishing of the architect of the Holocaust, this ideology continues to have a massive presence in our world. It has virtually no life at all in any academic setting, of course, but it has a huge presence in the darkest corners of opinion in many parts of the world. But precisely because of this chasm between respectable academia and trash-talking racist culture, we can sometimes be deceived about the violent threat this alternative form of collectivism represents to civilisation.

As we see from the killer’s manifesto, he was disgusted by commercial life and wanted conflict more than anything. Only a war of tribes would save the world from demographic and environmental disaster, in his view. He was impatient to see it begin. He believed that it was his personal responsibility to give the historical narrative a kick in the right direction, human rights and morality be damned.

It’s possible to commit heinous crimes without carrying around a wicked ideology to inspire and grant cover. But ideology can help embolden the mind with delusions that your evil acts are actually blessed by the forces of history, and that the blood you spill is not senseless killing but rather part of some needed corrective to the unfolding narrative of which you and your people have lost control.

How to combat this wickedness? The post-killing narrative will be is already filled with calls for gun control, controls on the Internet, controls on social media, more power for states to crack down on association and speech. This is precisely what the killer hoped to bring about, in his own words: “To incite violence, retaliation, and further divide… To create an atmosphere of fear and change in which drastic, powerful and revolutionary action can occur.”

The right response is to rededicate ourselves to the worldview that he hated the most, the view that rights are embedded in individuals, that people should have equal freedom to live their lives unencumbered by states and violence, that society contains within itself to capacity to manage itself without the intervention of fanatical ideologues who imagine themselves to be masters of our fate, that every single human life is worthy of dignity and deserving of respect.

The ideology of hate that spilled so much blood in Christchurch is best avenged through a new dedication to a social philosophy of love, harmony, cooperation, and freedom for all.

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Jeffrey Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
This post first appeared at the AIER blog.

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A brief on alt-right ideology

On the anniversary of the so-called "Unite the Right" alt-right march in the States, when they're apparently marching again in Washington D.C., Jeffrey Tucker points out in this guest post that if the movement has united anyone at all, it's not the right -- but the left! But it would be a grave mistake, he says, to think that the alt-right is just some clownish marchers at some rally waving flags and shouting threatening slogans. The real problem is the underlying philosophy...

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Every activist political movement eventually becomes a caricature of itself. This is certainly true of the so-called alt-right that blasted onto the cultural stage with its “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Part 2, today, in Washington, D.C., is revealing the irony. The lasting effect of this movement has been to unite the left. And not just the left: it is uniting most normal people who want to live a regular life, get along with others, and reduce the polarising effects of politics in our times.

Writing about this subject a year after my book came out always leads people to tell me that the alt-right is dead. I won this. I should stop writing about the issue.

The Philosophy

There is truth to this but it is mostly a superficial observation. Yes, the formal movement called the alt-right has become a caricature of itself, one particularly useful to the left-socialists who need an enemy and a threat to scare everyone about the coming dystopia.

What’s not dead, and has been a problem for 200 years, and which is still not understood, is the philosophical outlook that motivated the rise of the alt-right in the first place. It is more properly called Right Hegelianism. [And to paraphrase Keynes, "“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct philosopher like Hegel."]

Hegelianism (which split into left and right branches) was born in Germany in the early years of the 19th century as a reaction to the rise of liberalism in Europe and the world. This new movement rejected the core claim of liberalism that society can regulate itself and that individuals should be free to live good lives, believe what they want, say and print whatever they desire, and trade with anyone, so long as they didn’t hurt people.

Frederic Bastiat summed up the liberal view in the phrase “social harmony.” People figure out how to get along and build great things together so long as they are left alone by state authority. That was the liberal idea and it unleashed wealth creation and peace on the world, built the middle class, dramatically expanded living spans and population, and transformed life on earth. It gave birth to the idea of progress and eventually spread the idea of equal freedom for everyone: no more slavery, no more legal impediments to trade and association, universal rights to everyone, diplomacy instead of war, and free trade between all peoples.

Conflict Not Harmony

Hegelianism posited something very different, and it leads to a much more important way to view politics than the idiotic left-right split derived from French Revolutionary politics - that between those who value the liberal ideal of social harmony, and those who don't.

For those who don't, the social order simply cannot be left to the devices of Individual choice; it must acquiesce to forces of history that are more powerful than the randomness of human volition. These historical forces are the major player in revealing intractable conflict alive in the world. What is this conflict? Over many decades and centuries, the narrative would change. The struggle could be between classes, nations, languages, religions, sexes, mental abilities – really you can take your pick depending on the time and place. The agent that would harness the conflict and make it right would (always and everywhere) be the State.

There were two broad political branches of Hegelianism, left and right, that would become instantiated respectively in Marxism and Nazism --  but this was much later. In the intervening years, each side built its intellectual edifice brick by brick. Left Hegelianism took on many iterations before the Bolshevik variety finally achieved victory. Right Hegelianism began with the idea that history would culminate in total authority being granted unto the Prussian state and church, but it later became the animating force behind nationalism and bourgeoise statism in general.

The right Hegelian rogues gallery is huge. It involves protectionist Friedrich List, great-man theorist Thomas Carlyle, the luddite John Ruskin, the reactionary faux-aristocrat Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the race theorist Frederick Hoffman, the Darwin preservationist Madison Grant, the eugenicist Charles Davenport, the IQ theorist Henry Goddard, the communist turned Nazi philosopher Werner Sombart, the officious puritan misogynist Edward A. Ross, the brooding historicist Oswald Spengler, the anti-Semitic poet Ezra Pound, the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the radio populist priest Charles Edward Coughlin, the pretend-baron and violence lover Julius Caesar Evola, the jailed whacko Francis Parker Yockey who influence postwar rightists, and so many more.

What They Believe

Read enough of this material and you begin to notice certain themes. Yes, anti-liberalism unites them in every way, but what about their positive agenda? What is it exactly that they advocate?

First, they reject social harmony in favor of the friend/enemy distinction, which they believe brings essential drama to the course of what would otherwise be a boring life. There must be struggles. There must be battles. There must be war and violence. To take part is what gives life meaning.

Second, they believe in the centrality of nationhood over the individual, and this takes many forms depending on how one defines the nation. The nation can be based on race, geography, language, religion, or dynasty, or some combination thereof. Whatever it is, it is not for you to choose. It certainly isn’t an affair of the heart. This is terrain in which identity politics takes hold.

Third, trade protectionism is central because the things we use and the services we consume need to reinforce our attachment to nationhood. Free trade is too random to tolerate. Plus free trade lessens our attachment to the leader.

Which leads to, fourth, the leadership principle. The leader must be strong and compel assent. He is the central organizer whether in peace or war. He embodies the nation, instantiating the will of the people and their national identity. He must have a great story of overcoming every obstacle to triumph over all. He may build a wall or make the trains run on time, but in time the great man will conquer all.

Fifth, an essential part of the right Hegelian vision is rooted in demographic panic and opposition to the randomness of human reproduction. For them, there is always some crisis going on beyond our immediate control. The white race is disappearing. Christianity is dying. English is no longer normative. Manhood is disappearing. Nothing is made in America anymore. The wrong people are getting rich. The Jews are taking over. And so on. The presence of crisis necessitates panic that leads people to surrender control of their lives to some external saviour.

Ideas Not Marches

It’s a mistake to think that the fate of the alt-right is bound up with public perceptions toward clownish marchers at some rally where people are waving flags and shouting threatening slogans. The real problem is the underlying philosophy that regards peace as a threat, prosperity as deracinating, and freedom itself as nihilistic chaos that cries out to be replaced by dictatorship, law, and imposed order.

That philosophy is still with us, and it triggers the rise of left Hegelianism, which is another problem to address on another day.

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Jeffrey Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and eight books in 5 languages, including his penetrating analysis of the alt-right 'Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty'
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The Prehistory of the Alt-right

 

Adherents of the new "alt-right" movement that has arisen with Trump like to see themselves as subversive, as new, as cutting edge. Yet their tale of clashing forces driven forward by strong men is as old and stale s totalitarianism itself, explains Jeffrey Tucker in this guest post.
    Rejecting Marxism is good, he agrees. But we choose mega-states, strongmen, national planning, or religious and racial homogeneity at our deep peril. And if you are feeling tempted toward the Alt-right, look at your progenitors: do you like what you see? Here we have a lineage of non-Marxist, non-leftist brand of rightist but still totalitarian thinking.
    Let us not be deceived. Whatever the flavour–whichever branch of Hegel we choose to follow–the cost of increased government control is greatly diminished human liberty, prosperity, and dignity.

Reading Evan Stern’s “Why I Left the Left” is a solid reminder that there’s not much intellectual heft remaining on that side of the political fence. If an ideology sets out to isolate the locus of evil in people’s very identity, it is pretty well spent. This, in addition to the failure of the socialist model everywhere it has tried, explains why the Left has suffered so much recently at the polls and now faces a serious backlash in campus and public life.

With the failure of action comes reaction; now as the alternative the Western world is dealing with something far less familiar to most people yet just as threatening: the rise of the alt-right. Due to its taboo-breaking, rebel ethos that so easily inflames teachers and protectors of civic conventions, it is highly attractive to some young people.

The movement however is more than just young people being politically incorrect. It has a real philosophical and political history, one that stands in violent opposition to the idea of individual liberty. It has been largely suppressed since World War II and, because of that, most people assumed fascism (and its offshoots) was gone from the earth.

As a result, this generation has not been philosophically prepared to recognise the tradition, the signs, the implications, and the political application of the ideology so many are stumbling to embrace.

Here then is a brief prehistory of what we call the alt-right today, which is probably better described as a 21st-century incarnation of what in the 19th century would have been called “right-Hegelianism” – after German philosopher GFW Hegel, as opposed to what Karl Marx later developed as “left-Hegelianism.” To get right to the core ideas that form something like a school of thought that developed over more than a century, I’m skipping over many political movements (in Spain, France, and Italy), and clownish leaders like George Lincoln Rockwell, Oswald Mosley, and Fr. Coughlin. 

Here we have a lineage of non-Marxist, non-leftist brand of rightist but still totalitarian thinking, developed in fanatical opposition to bourgeois freedom.

1820: Georg Friedrich Hegel published Elements of the Philosophy of Right, which spelled out the political implications of his “dialectical idealism,” an outlook that departed dramatically from the classical liberal tradition by completely abstracting from human experience to posit that what shapes history are warring life forces operating beyond anyone’s control. It turns out that the politics of this view amounted to “the state is the march of God through the world.”
    Hegel looked forward to some age in the future that would realise this apotheosis of State control, towards which he claimed all history was moving.
    In a 1952 lecture by Ludwig von Mises (a strong classical liberal and virulent opponent of this whole worldview) the Hegelian view quickly broke into Left and Right branches, depending on the attitude toward nationalism and religion (the right supported the Prussian state and church, whereas the left did not), and thereby “destroyed German thinking and German philosophy for more than a century, at least.”

1841: Thomas Carlyle published On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, which popularised the “great man” theory of history. History is not about marginal improvements in living standards by using better tools, he argued, but rather about huge episodic shifts brought about through power.
    A champion of slavery and another opponent of classical liberalism, Carlyle took aim at the rise of commercial society, praising Cromwell, Napoleon, and Rousseau, and rhapsodising about the glories of political power. “The Commander over Men; he to whose will our wills are to be subordinated, and loyally surrender themselves, and find their welfare in doing so, may be reckoned the most important of Great Men.”
    Carlyle's target was Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment generally. Hitler’s biographers agree that the words of Carlyle were the last he requested to be read to him before he died.

1841: On the continent, meanwhile, Friedrich List published The National System of Political Economy, celebrating protectionism, infrastructure spending, and government control and support of industry. His was, for half a century the most influential voice in German economics, a direct attack on laissez faire and a celebration of the national unit as the only truly productive force in economic life. Steven Davies comments: “The most serious result of List’s ideas was a change in people’s thinking and perception. Instead of seeing trade as a cooperative process of mutual benefit, politicians and businessmen came to regard it as a struggle with winners and losers.”
    Today's economic nationalists have nothing new to add to the edifice already constructive by List. 

1871: Charles Darwin left the realm of science briefly to enter sociological analysis with his book The Descent of Man. It is a fascinating work but tended to treat human society as a zoological rather than sociological and economic enterprise. It included an explosive paragraph (qualified and widely misread) that regretted how “we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment… Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” At the very least, he suggested, we should stop the weak from marrying. This is the “one check” we have to keep society from being taken over by inferiors. Tragically, this passing comment fired up the eugenicists who immediately began to plot demographic planning schemes to avoid a terrifying biological slide to universal human degeneracy. 

1896: The American Economic Association published Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro by Frederick Hoffman. This monograph, one of many of the type, described blacks as intractable criminals who are both lazy and promiscuous, the influence of whom in national biology can only lead to a decline of the race. Their mere presence was considered an existential threat to “uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.” Such views were embraced by Richard T. Ely, the founder of the American Economic Association, and came to dominate the academic journals of this period, providing academic cover for Jim Crow laws, state segregation, business regulation, and far worse. 

1904: The founder of the American eugenics society, Charles Davenport, established the Station for Experimental Evolution and worked to propagate eugenics from his perch as Professor of Zoology at Harvard University. He was hugely influential on an entire generation of scientists, political figures, economists, and public bureaucrats, and it was due largely to this influence that eugenics became such a central concern of American policies from this period until World War II, influencing the passage of wage legislation, immigration, marriage law, working hours legislation, and, of course, mandatory sterilisations.

At this point in history, all five “intellectual” pillars of fascist theory (historicist, nationalist, racist, protectionist, statist) were in place. It had a theory of history. It had a picture of hell, which is liberalism and uncontrolled commercial society. It had a picture of heaven, which was national societies run by great men inhabiting all-powerful States focused on heavy industry. It even had a (psuedo) scientific rationale. 

Above all, it had an agenda: to control society from the top down with the aim of managing every aspect of the demographic path of human society, which meant controlling human beings all the way from conception to grave to produce the most superior product, as well as industrial planning to replace the wiles of the market process. The idea of freedom itself, to this emergent school of thought, was a disaster for everyone everywhere.

All that was really necessary was popularisation of its most incendiary ideas. The world didn’t have long to wait.

1916: Madison Grant, a scholar of enormous prestige and elite connections, published The Passing of the Great Race. It was never a bestseller but it exercised enormous influence among the ruling elites, and made a famous appearance in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Grant, an early environmentalist, recommended mass sterilisation of people as a “practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem” that should be “applied to an ever-widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.”
    Hitler loved the book and sent Grant a note praising the book as his personal bible.

1919: Following World War I, German historian Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West, which met with huge popular acclaim for capturing the sense of the moment: that the cash economy and liberalism were dead and could only be replaced by the rise of monolithic cultural forms that rally around as the only remaining sources of meaning: blood and race. Blood beats money all over the world, he argued. The interminable and foggy text broods with right-Hegelian speculations about the status of man and predicts the complete downfall of all lovely things unless the civilisation of the West dispenses with its attachment to commercial norms and individualism and instead rallies to this cause of group identity.
    The book kicked off a decade of similar works and movements that declared freedom and democracy to be dead ideas: the only relevant battle, they all argued, was between the communist and fascist forms of state planning. 

1932: Carl Schmitt published The Concept of the Political, a brutal attack on classical liberalism as the negation of the political. For Schmitt, the political was the essence of life, and the friend/enemy distinction is its most salient feature. Friends and enemies were to be defined by the State, and enemy-ness can only be fully instantiated in bloodshed, which should be real and present. Mises called him “the Nazi Jurist” for a reason: he was a party member and his ideas contributed mightily to the perception that mass death was not only moral, but essential to the preservation of the meaning of life itself.

1944: Allied troops discovered thousands of death camps strewn throughout Nazi-captured territories in Europe, created beginning in 1933 and continuing through the duration of the war, responsible for the imprisonment and death of upwards of 15 million people.
    The discovery shocked an entire generation at the most fundamental level, and the scramble was on to discover all sources of evil–political and ideological–that had led to such a gruesome reality. With the Nazi forces defeated and the Nuremberg trials underscoring the point, the advance of fascist dogma in all of its brooding, racist, statist, and historicist timbres, came to a screeching halt.
    Suppression of the ideas therein began in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, creating the impression that right-Hegelianism was a mere flash in the pan that had been permanently doused by state power. 

The same year as the death-camp discovery began, F.A. Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, which emphasised that it was not enough to reject the labels, songs, slogans, and regimes of Nazism and fascism. Also necessary, Hayek pointed out, was the thorough rejection of the ideas of planning themselves, which even in a democracy necessarily led to the end of freedom and to the rise of dictatorship.
    His book was met with critical acclaim among a small group of remaining classical liberals (many of whom were involved in the founding of FEE and the Mont Pelerin Society two and three years later respectively) but was otherwise denounced and derided as paranoid and reactionary by many others.

For the duration of the ensuing Cold War, it was the fear of communism and not fascism/Nazism that would captivate the public mind. After all, the latter had been defeated on the battlefield, right? The genesis and development of rightest totalitarianism, despite the earnest pleadings of Hannah Arendt, fell away from public consciousness.

Liberalism Not Yet

 

The intellectual battle against fascism was never fully or widely-enough waged, its siren song never fully snuffed out.

The Cold War ended 25 years ago and the rise of digital technology has given liberal forms of political economy a gigantic presence in the world. Trade has never been more integrated. Human rights are on the march. Commercial life, and its underlying ideology of harmony and peace, is the prevailing aspiration of billions of people around the world. The failures of government planning are ever more obvious. And yet these trends alone do not seal the deal for the cause of liberty. Instead, they are widely and increasingly denounced, from the White House on up.

With left-Hegelianism now in disgrace, political movements around the world are instead rooting around in the pre-war history of totalitarian ideas to find alternatives [as if classical liberalism had never happened! – Ed]. The suppression of these ideas did not work; in fact, they had the opposite effect of making them more popular to the point where they boiled up from below. The result is what we call the Alt-right in the US and goes by many other names in Europe and the UK. (The transition from the 1990s to the present will be the subject of another essay.)

Let us not be deceived. Whatever the flavour – whichever branch of Hegel we choose to follow – the cost of government control is human liberty, prosperity, and dignity. We choose mega-states, strongmen, national planning, or religious and racial homogeneity at our deep peril.

For the most part, the meme-posting trolls who favour profile pics on their social accounts that are stormfront-stye, (or boasting crusader shields or crosses of St George, or both), and the mass movements calling for strongmen to take control and cast the other from their midst, both are clueless about the history and path they are following.

If you are feeling tempted toward the Alt-right, look at your progenitors: do you like what you see?

What is the alternative to right and left Hegelianism? It is found in the liberal tradition, summed up by Frederic Bastiat's phrase "the harmony of interests." Peace, prosperity, liberty, and community are possible. It is this tradition, and not one that posits intractable war between groups, that protects and expands human rights and human dignity, and creates the conditions that allow for the universal ennoblement of the human person. (For more on the history of despotic ideas in the 20th century, I suggest Mises's epic 1947 book Planned Chaos, now available, free, in epub.) 

The last word on the correct (freedom-loving) path forward was framed by the great English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1830, a statement that would be loathed by every fascist in history:

“It is not by the intermeddling of an omniscient and omnipotent State, but by the prudence and energy of the people, that England has hitherto been carried forward in civilisation; and it is to the same prudence and the same energy that we now look with comfort and good hope. Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest.”

To be continued …

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Quotes of the Day: Rand on Mises and elsewhere [update 3]

 

I’ll say in advance that this post is not for everyone.

Who is it for? Mainly for readers of Rand and/or of Austrian economics who either wonder what the former thought about the latter, or who have been seriously misinformed about the substance of ‘Austrianism’ itself.

Readers of Ayn Rand who know Austrian economics only by glissandi on the interwebs performed by otherwise ill-educated Rand readers & writers (yes, they exist), or written by Rand herself in her Marginalia (opinions written in public not intended to be made public outside their context), may come away with many wrong ideas about the economics, and a notion that Rand didn’t rate what she’d read.

That last couldn’t be further from the truth, and the former less deserved. I’ve written and linked to many posts here over the years indicating why that might be so (perhaps because the founder of Austrian economics “Carl Menger was Aristotelian and had a lot in common with Rand”) For what it’s worth, neither Rand nor Peikoff held a negative view either of Austrian economics’ value nor of the value of Von Mises’s work – except where it divorced value from economics. Not only did they study his work, as seen in the books and magazines by Von Mises and his colleagues that they devoured, they rated it highly and recommended it widely.

It’s true that she thoroughly criticises Mises’s masterwork Human Action in her Marginalia, which (though now published) were never intended by her for public consumption. But note that her criticisms, written in the margins of the books as she read through, are largely of the earlier chapters of 'Human Action'-- of his epistemology, and NOT of the economics. Rand thought extremely highly of Mises's work on economics and business cycle theory, elements of which you can see in her own work.

And when one of her circle proposed taking Mises to task publicly for such things as she criticised in the marginalia, she reportedly advised, "Oh, leave him alone. He's done enough." And so he had. And so she admired.

Rand attended Mises’s seminars in New York, at which she really began her ‘formal’ education in economics. “She acknowledged him,” said Roy Childs later, “as one of the greatest minds of our time, even while disagreeing with his philosophic base, and as having made a tremendous contribution to liberty.”

And the admiration was reciprocated. Henry Hazlitt relates that he was walking with Rand one day, and told her that Mises had declared, "Ayn Rand is one of the greatest men in history." "Did he say men?" asked Rand. "Yes," Hazlitt responded. At which point Rand clapped her hands in glee.

His opinion mattered to her. And it mattered to her very much that others read and understood his work,

As late as the fifties, [explains B. Branden] Von Mises was relatively unknown in the United States - his books not published here before 1944 - until, beginning in the late fifties and continuing for more than ten years, [after being introduced to his work by people like Henry Hazlitt, Leonard Read and George Reisman¹] Ayn began a concerted campaign to have his work read and appreciated: she published reviews, she cited him in articles and in public speeches, she attended some of his seminars at New York University, she recommended him to admirers of her philosophy. A number of economists have said that it was largely as a result of Ayn's efforts that the work of Von Mises began to reach its potential audience.

So for easy reference, I’ve added below a series of excerpts indicating mentions of Von Mises and other Austrians in Rand’s and Peikoff’s books. It only includes direct references, not for example articles like ‘Egalitarianism and Inflation,’ in which AustroClassical capital theory is all but explicit. Few are even remotely negative, and those that seem so (like Rand’s reply to William Hutt) simply clarify where she places economics in her philosophic hierarchy, and her view of on the danger of value-free economics (on which George Reisman, student of both Rand and Mises, once commented, “given the role of wealth in human life … it is incumbent upon economics to justify itself by providing philosophical validation for the production of wealth being a central, continuing concern of human existence.” In other words, a value.

So this is not to say that there are not things about which to disagree in Austrian economics, but as Reisman observed looking back at his own economic education, “I do not recall a single paragraph of Von Mises that did not serve as an inspiration to my own thinking, even in the cases (which were relatively few) in which I ultimately came to disagree with him”  -- and he concludes his own book by recommending again the reading and dissemination of Rand and Von Mises’s books, “the further spread of the ideas of these two historic figures [being, he says] the only possible basis for the further growth and ultimate success of the pro-capitalist cause.”

---

Austrian References in Ayn Rand’s books, letters & journals (specific reference in bold)

From ‘The Ayn Rand Letter’ …

If student minorities have succeeded in demanding that they be given courses on such subjects as Zen Buddhism, guerrilla warfare, Swahili, and astrology, then an intellectual student minority can succeed in demanding courses on, for instance, Aristotle in philosophy, von Mises in economics, Montessori in education, Hugo in literature. At the very least, such courses would save the students' mind; potentially, they would save the culture.
- ‘The Ayn Rand Letter,’ Vol. 1, No. 19 June 19, 1972, "Fairness Doctrine" For Education--Part II”

From Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal …

The financial mechanism of an economy is the sensitive centre, the living heart, of business activity. In no other area can government intervention produce quite such disastrous consequences. For a general discussion of the business cycle and its relation to government manipulation of the money supply, see Ludwig von Mises, Human Action. … ²

The productive value of physical labour as such is low. If the worker of today produces more than the worker of fifty years ago, it is not because the former exerts more physical effort; quite the contrary: the physical effort required of him is far less. The productive value of his effort has been multiplied many times by the tools and machines with which he works; they are crucial in determining the economic worth of his services. To illustrate this principle: consider what would be a man’s economic reward, on a desert island, for pushing his finger the distance of half an inch; then consider the wages paid, for pushing a button, to an elevator operator in New York City. It is not muscles that make the difference. As Ludwig von Mises observes [in http://mises.org/library/capital-supply-and-american-prosperity ]: American wages are higher than wages in other countries because the capital invested per head of the worker is greater and the plants are thereby in the position to use the most efficient tools and machines. What is called the American way of life is the result of the fact that the United States has put fewer obstacles in the way of saving and capital accumulation than other nations. The economic backwardness of such countries as India consists precisely in the fact that their policies hinder both the accumulation of capital and the investment of foreign capital. As the capital required is lacking, the Indian enterprises are prevented from employing sufficient quantities of modern equipment, are therefore producing much less per man hour and can only afford to pay wage rates which, compared with American wage rates, appear as shockingly low’. … ² 

For excellent, more detailed discussions of these issues, see Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, especially the chapter entitled “Wages, Unemployment and Inflation,” and Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946), especially the chapters entitled “Minimum Wage Laws” and “Do Unions Really Raise Wages?” … ²

It is significant how many heirs of great industrial fortunes, the second- and third-generation millionaires, are welfare statists, clamouring for more and more controls. The target and victims of these controls are the men of ability who, in a free economy, would displace these heirs; the men with whom the heirs would be unable to compete. As Ludwig von Mises writes in Human Action: Today taxes often absorb the greater part of the newcomer’s ‘excessive’ profits. He cannot accumulate capital; he cannot expand his own business; he will never become big business and a match for the vested interests. The old firms do not need to fear his competition; they are sheltered by the tax collector. They may with impunity indulge in routine. . . . It is true, the income tax prevents them, too, from accumulating new capital. But what is more important for them is that it prevents the dangerous newcomer from accumulating any capital. They are virtually privileged by the tax system. In this sense progressive taxation checks economic progress and makes for rigidity. . . . The interventionists complain that big business is getting rigid and bureaucratic and that it is no longer possible for competent newcomers to challenge the vested interests of the old rich families. However, as far as their complaints are justified, they complain about things which are merely the result of their own policies. … ²

How did children thrive before the Industrial Revolution? In 1697, John Locke wrote a report for the Board of Trade on the problem of poverty and poor-relief. Locke estimated that a labouring man and his wife in good health could support no more than two children, and he recommended that all children over three years of age should be taught to earn their living at working schools for spinning and knitting, where they would be given food. ‘What they can have at home, from their parents,’ wrote Locke, ‘is seldom more than bread and water, and that very scantily too.’ Professor Ludwig von Mises reminds us: The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. It is a distortion of facts to say that the factories carried off the housewives from the nurseries and the kitchen and the children from their play. These women had nothing to cook with and to feed their children. These children were destitute and starving. Their only refuge was the factory. It saved them, in the strict sense of the term, from death by starvation. … ³

The result of legislative intervention was that these dismissed children, who needed to work in order to survive, were forced to seek jobs in smaller, older, and more out-of-the-way factories, where the conditions of employment, sanitation, and safety were markedly inferior. Those who could not find new jobs were reduced to the status of their counterparts a hundred years before, that is, to irregular agricultural labour, or worse—in the words of Professor von Mises—to ‘infest the country as vagabonds, beggars, tramps, robbers and prostitutes.’ Child labour was not ended by legislative fiat; child labour ended when it became economically unnecessary for children to earn wages in order to survive… ³

The proper answer to the critics of the Industrial Revolution is given by Professor T. S. Ashton [from a book edited by F.A. Hayek]: There are today on the plains of India and China men and women, plague-ridden and hungry, living lives little better, to outward appearance, than those of the cattle that toil with them by day and share their places of sleep by night. Such Asiatic standards, and such un-mechanized horrors, are the lot of those who increase their numbers without passing through an industrial revolution.42 Let me add that the Industrial Revolution and its consequent prosperity were the achievement of capitalism and cannot be achieved under any other politico-economic system.… ³

CUI - Recommended Bibliography

Books by Ludwig Von Mises

• The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
• Bureaucracy
• Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
• Omnipotent Government
• Planned Chaos
• Planning for Freedom
• Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
• The Theory of Money and Credit

Books by Henry Hazlitt

• The Critics of Keynesian Economics (edited by Hazlitt)
• Economics in One Lesson
• The Failure of the "New Economics": An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies
• What You Should Know About Inflation

Books and articles by other Austrian authors

• Ballve, Faustino, Essentials of Economics
• Bohm-Bawerk, Eugen von, ‘The Exploitation Theory’

From The Journals of Ayn Rand

From Part 3 - Transition Between Novels: s. 8 – ‘The Moral Basis Of Individualism’

…Granted that collectivism and statism are brought about by minorities—as [Ludwig] von Mises proves. What can the minority of prime-movers do about it? Are the collectivists' methods open and proper to prime-movers?  Won't the majority always follow the collectivists if given a clear choice? (No, I think.) Isn't it actually true that even among collectivists and statists it is always a prime-mover off the track who does the real damage?—so that the world is destroyed by the Wynands, not the Tooheys? (I think so.) [Here AR is grasping an idea essential to Atlas Shrugged: that evil is impotent it has no power except that which the good grants it.] But if so—can it ever be stopped? What can stop prime-movers from going off the track for one reason or another? I suppose the answer is: Nothing. There is no automatic fool-proof and error-proof [way]. If there were, there would be no free will. Nothing can ever replace man's necessity to make a free, conscious choice—the necessity of an effort of reason. All we can do is indicate the right way, the proper principles—and then fight, fight, and fight for them. …

That a man knows the right idea is not enough. He must still act upon it. There are, then, two acts of the free will: the will to know the truth and then the will to act upon it. The first does not lead automatically to the second…

From The Letters of Ayn Rand

From The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged Years (1945-1959)

To Leonard Read
February 28, 1946

…That is why I do not believe that an economic education alone is of any value. That is also why you will find it difficult to arouse people's interest in the subject. I believe you are conscious of this difficulty; your prospectus shows anxiety on the scope of "creating a greater desire for economic understanding." You will not be able to create it.
    The great mistake here is in assuming that economics is a science which can be isolated from moral, philosophical and political principles, and considered as a subject in itself, without relation to them. It can't be done.
    The best example of that is Von Mises' Omnipotent Government. That is precisely what he attempted to do, in a very objective, conscientious, scholarly way. And he failed dismally, even though his economic facts and conclusions were for the most part unimpeachable. He failed to present a convincing case because at the crucial points, where his economics came to touch upon moral issues (as all economics must), he went into thin air, into contradictions, into nonsense. He did prove, all right, that collectivist economics don't work. And he failed to convert a single collectivist.

Dear Rose Wilder Lane
1946

…Now to your second question: "Do those almost with us do more harm than 100% enemies?" I don't think this can be answered with a flat "yes" or "no," because the "almost" is such a wide term and can cover so many different attitudes. I think each particular case has to be judged on his own performance, but there is one general rule to observe: those who are with us, but merely do not go far enough, yet do not serve the opposite cause in any way, are the ones who do us some good and who are worth educating. Those who agree with us in some respects, yet preach contradictory ideas at the same time, are definitely more harmful than the 100% enemies. The standard of judgment here has to be the man's attitude toward basic principles. If he shares our basic principles, but goes off on lesser details in the application of these principles, he is worth educating and having as an ally. If his "almost" consists of sharing some of the basic principles of collectivism, then we ought to run from him faster than from an out-and-out Communist.
   As an example of the kind of "almost" I would tolerate, I'd name Ludwig von Mises. His book, Omnipotent Government, had some bad flaws, in that he attempted to divorce economics from morality, which is impossible; but with the exception of his last chapter, which simply didn't make sense, his book was good, and did not betray our cause. The flaws in his argument merely weakened his own effectiveness, but did not help the other side.

Dear Rose Wilder Lane
1946

…You asked my opinion of your review of Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Your review is excellent, and I agree with all of it (except one small point). I think you have been eminently fair in giving him credit for the virtues of his book—and there are many. But you picked quite properly on its basic weakness. I think this is another case such as that of Ludwig von Mises. Hazlitt tried to divorce economics from ethics. He presented a strictly economic argument, telling how things work out, and carefully omitting to state why the way they work out is proper—that is, what principles should properly guide men's actions in the economic field. He did not say that we should sacrifice minority groups for the sake of the whole, but that was certainly the implication of his book, which is certainly a collectivist implication.
    This is an example of why I maintain that no book on economics can have real value or importance if economics are divorced from morality. When one attempts to do it, one merely spreads the implications and premises of the collectivist morality and defeats one's case for the more thoughtful readers.
    I wish you had blasted one particular passage in the book, which made me more angry than all the other flaws, and really spoiled the book for me. That was the passage where Hazlitt states that a virtuous, responsible man of wealth should donate to charity and should refrain from buying luxuries, because these take productive resources away from the manufacture of necessities for the poor (p. 192). That was really a crucial betrayal of our case. It is not true as economics, and it is wrong as morality. It is pure, explicit collectivism.

To Henry Hazlitt, February 26, 1951
Dear Harry:

I do envy you for the fact that your novel [The Great Idea, later retitled Time Will Run Back] is finished and is about to come out. Archie Ogden was here and told me a little about it. It sounded extremely interesting, and I am looking forward to reading it. All my best wishes to you for the success you deserve.
    I have not been able to read every issue of ‘The Freeman’ from cover to cover as I would have liked to, but I have followed your political editorials "The Fortnight." I have no criticism to offer in that respect, only my best compliments and my wish that you keep it up.
    Of the articles which I liked very much, I'll mention "Council for the Minority" by Robert Morris, "Lord Keynes and Say's Law" by Ludwig von Mises, "For President: Mickey Cohen" by Morrie Ryskind, "Plan for Counter-action' by Rodney Gilbert—particularly this last….

Dear John [Hospers]
(1960)

… You are right when you say that "It's true that money has to be spent over a long period in order to get more money in the end, but that this does not constitute any reason why the government should do it." I would like to offer further objections to their argument as you present it in your letter: not every long-term investment of money is necessarily and automatically profitable or self-liquidating; that depends on the investor's economic judgment; bad judgment leads to a total loss, to bankruptcy or "money poured down the drain." When, however, the investor is the government, then the results are necessarily disastrous for the economy, for the following reasons:
    A. There is no way, standard or criterion by which to judge the economic value and future of an investment, outside of the free-market mechanism of supply and demand (see Ludwig von Mises for the details of why economic calculation is impossible to a socialistic government).
    B. Assume in some specific case that the government has invested money in some long-term project which may actually have future economic value; the fact that it was a forced, premature investment which was not yet economically justified (that is: not yet profitable for private investors), which the economy could not yet afford, has disastrous repercussions on the whole economy and causes unpredictable, incalculably harmful consequences. The best example of that is the government-subsidized construction of the so-called first transcontinental railroad in the United States (the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific). A railroad, as such, is an economic value; but the premature construction of a railroad which private capital could not yet find profitable caused economic evils (the plight of the farmers, the Granger movement, etc.) which are still multiplying to this day.
    To illustrate my point in a simple manner: suppose that you are an industrialist and that you want to market an invention which will bring you a fortune in ten years; if your calculations are sound, that would be a good investment, and you would be justified in saving your money for it and in living modestly for ten years. But suppose you decide to market an invention which will bring you a fortune in a hundred years and for which the savings of your lifetime are not sufficient. Would that be a good investment? Would you become prosperous by spending your life on the level of semi-starvation and by draining the resources of all those who may lend you money? Would that be wise or economically sound? By what standard could you be certain—even if your entire generation died in misery, pouring all resources into your project—that the invention would still be needed or valuable to your children or grandchildren who, by that time, would be perishing for lack of shoes, clothes and adequate shelter?
    These are merely the economic or "practical" consequences of government "investment." The moral meaning and consequences are obvious: by what right does the government take the money of some individuals for the future benefit of other individuals? By what right does it [exact] privations on an individual, against his own choice and judgment, for the future benefit of himself or others, actual or hypothetical? That which is in fact beneficial to an economy (that is: to the individuals who comprise an economy) is done by men voluntarily (as the history of capitalism demonstrates); that which cannot be proved to be beneficial does not become so at the point of a gun…

To Martin Larson, a "humanist" writer
July 15, 1960

Dear Dr. Larson:

… As to your statement that "laissez-faire" capitalism is the cause of depressions—this is an issue of economic fact and is simply untrue. The cause of depressions is government interference into economics. For proof, I refer you to such books as Capitalism the Creator by Carl Snyder, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, How Can Europe Survive by Hans Sennholz, and the works of the great economist Ludwig von Mises…

To W. H. Hutt, economics professor at the University of Virginia
August 28, 1966
Dear Professor Hutt:

… No, the "Austrian approach" has not "helped to mould" my philosophy. It is one of the many approaches to capitalism which I oppose, though I do agree with many of its purely economic ideas…

Austrian references in Leonard Peikoff:

From Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand,

Chapter 11—Capitalism

…There are flaws in classical economics, to be sure, and even in its best modern heir, the Austrian school as represented by Ludwig von Mises. But capitalism is not perishing from such flaws. It is perishing from the absence of a rational philosophy. This absence alone explains why the abundance of economic answers offered to our century by a better past has been ignored by the world and will go on being ignored.
    Economics is invaluable as a supplement to philosophy. Like a body without a mind, however, it is worthless and impossible apart from philosophy….

From The Ominous Parallels,

2 - The Totalitarian Universe

The initiators of German nationalism in the nineteenth century were not the Junkers, the military men, big business, or the middle classes. "All these groups," notes Ludwig von Mises,
    were at first strongly opposed to the aspirations of Pan-Germanism. But their resistance was vain because
    it lacked an ideological backing. There were no longer any liberal [individualistic] authors in Germany. Thus
    the nationalist writers and professors easily conquered. Very soon the youth came back from the
    universities and lower schools convinced Pan-Germans. (15)
On this issue, the leading teacher of the teachers of the youth was Hegel.

7 - United They Fell

Bismarck's conservative supporters at the time, including the professorate and the Lutheran Church, had accepted such programs enthusiastically, as a natural expression of Prussian paternalism, social-mindedness, and sense of duty. The base of Bismarck's approach was established by the so-called "socialists of the chair," a group of highly influential social-science professors at the German universities. The ideas of these men, notes von Mises, "were almost identical with those later held by the British Fabians and the American Institutionalists .... "
    … The Free Corps did not consist only of soldiers. "Next to the war veterans," writes one scholar, "students formed the largest group in the Free Corps. For the most part, they were young idealists" who despised "peace and money-grabbing." "Next to the racist officers," said the leader of Hitler's Storm Troopers, Ernst Ro m, recalling his Free Corps days, "it was primarily the aggressiveness and loyalty of the students that strengthened us."(32)
    Such were the men who, in a series of brutal armed confrontations (brutal on both sides), decisively crushed the Spartacist threat—thereby gaining, at the expense of the hand-wringing moderates, the prestige of national heroes. From this time on, the Communists were forced, despite their ideology, to try to gain power by electoral means. "The German nation," observes Ludwig von Mises, "obtained parliamentary government as a gift from the hands of deadly foes of freedom, who waited for an opportunity to take back their present."(33)

References to Chapter 12

… Von Mises describes the Nazi method of expropriating profits: "As all private consumption is strictly limited and controlled by the government, and as all unconsumed income must be invested, which means virtually lent to the government, high profits are nothing but a subtle method of taxation. The consumer has to pay high prices and business is nominally profitable. But the greater the profits are, the more the government funds are swelled. The government gets the money .... "(p. 226) Brady, op. cit., p. 292; quoting Hjalmar Schacht at the opening of the National Labor and Economic Council in Nuremberg.

And finally

From Rand’s Voices of Reason,

10 - The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age

…It was not the businessmen or the industrialists or the workers or the labour unions that began the revolt against freedom, the demand for greater and greater government power and, ultimately, for the return to an absolute, totalitarian state; it was the intellectuals. For a detailed history of the steps by which the intellectuals of Germany led it toward totalitarianism, culminating in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, I will refer you to a brilliant book entitled Omnipotent Government by Professor Ludwig von Mises. For a detailed history of the intellectuals' role in America, I will refer you to The Decline of American Liberalism by Professor Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., which I mentioned earlier….

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FURTHER READING:

• The logical place to begin would be the with the books and writing already recommended above, in addition to the magnum opus of the student of both Rand and Mises, George Reisman’s Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, the very title a tribute to both.
• More impatient students however who still need convincing that the enthusiast for Rand will find much to value in Austrian economics may enjoy some of Ed Younkins’s many article-length efforts to demonstrate the connections between them both, including
  • Austrian Economics Can be Compatible with Objectivist Ethics
  • Can the Ideas of Mises and Rand Be Reconciled?
  • Metaphysics & Epistemology for a Free Society: The Views of Menger, Mises & Rand
  • Ayn Rand and Friedrich A. Hayek: A Side-by-Side Comparison

UPDATED 10 and 11 Jan. (Update 1 & 2) to add:

NOTE

1. James Valliant has reminded me that Henry Hazlitt & Leonard Read had introduced Rand to Mises’s work in the mid-40s (their names have been added), and has challenged me on the claim regarding Reisman.
    This last is my own supposition based on a combination of Reisman’s ‘Preface’ to his book Capitalism, and the context given by note 7, page 172 of the Ayn Rand’s Marginalia, which says that the comments therein on Human Action have omitted all references to George Reisman, to whom "a few" of her marginal notes were addressed. (How many or how few we can only guess.)
    Given this context, and understanding that several of the marginal comments are addressed to "George," it seems clear she is reading Human Action for the first time, which means encountering Mises’s actual economics in toto for the first time, and while ploughing through the praxeology of the early chapters she has not yet realised either the value of the book to come, nor of its author, nor of the school for which he was then the foremost proponent. (For Example "George!” she notes at one point [p.136], “If it weren't for you, I would drop any book containing that sentence." She didn’t, but it seems likely it was only because of George’s recommendation.)
PS: There is probably a good article to be written on how her comments change as she progresses through Human Action (a shame, in this context, that George's name has been edited out), noting (as the editor does in his introduction) that most the criticisms in the Marginalia recede as she gets past the praxeology and on to the economics.
2. From the chapter ‘Common Fallacies About Capitalism’ by N. Branden
3. From the chapter ‘The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children,’ by Robert Hessen

UPDATE 3: James Valliant adds further ammunition on this front:

To see how Rand appreciated the Austrians, including Mises, all one needs to do is to open the very first issue of Rand's first periodical, 'The Objectivist Newsletter', which declared Mises to be "the most distinguished economist of our age" and "an intransigent advocate of freedom and capitalism" ('The Objectivist Newsletter', "Review: Planned Chaos by Ludwig von Mises," vol. 1, no. 1, Jan., 1962, p. 2), praising his "brilliant lucidity and ruthless logic," and then, the second issue which declared Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson to be "a classic in the literature of freedom" and "the finest primer available for students of capitalism" ('The Objectivist Newsletter', "Review: Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt," vol. 1, no. 2, Feb., 1962, p. 2.)
    The admiration was reciprocated: Mises invited Rand to attend his seminar as an "honoured guest" (J. Burns, Goddess of the Market, p. 177), and he praised Atlas Shrugged as "a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by governments and political parties" and "a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society" in a personal letter to Rand (dated Jan. 23, 1958, quoted in Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, p. 996.)

FURTH

.FIRYTHJER

Clinton’s attack on the alt-right, and 7 differences between them and libertarians

 

Who or what is the “alt-right”? Answer to that very soon, but to the delight of that antediluvian bunch of self-described white nationalists previously confined to the more fetid parts of the internet, the Republican nominee has been forthrightly spreading their memes [read here for background] and in a major speech last week the Democratic nominee has now put them firmly on the map.

Clinton’s attack on this movement she says has “taken over” the Republican Party is “in no small part part, aimed at telling moderate Republican voters and GOP-leaning independents that their values aren’t truly represented by the nightmare ideology otherwise known as Trumpism.”

He may be the GOP nominee, but he has perverted and distorted Republicanism into something so twisted and horrifying, so unlike anything else we’ve seen in modern times, that they shouldn’t feel bound by party loyalty or political habit to stand by him.

The attack is calculated to drive a wedge between these traditional Republicans and the candidate and his team whom they would otherwise be beholden to support.

This crowd of racist-right circle-jerkers being attacked however couldn’t care less about political calculations. The only thing for them worse than being calculated about is not being calculated about. So even if they’re being insulted, they’re a happy bunch of Trumpanzees.

Hoping to collect votes from both Republicans and Democrats appalled at their party’s respective nominees is Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, who’s been running a very strong “I’m-the-sane-candidate” strategy against the loony tunes winging their way either side of him.

Confusingly however, many commentators mistake libertarians for these alt-right meatheads focussed on “white identity politics, many nascent libertarians themselves have found themselves seduced by the siren songs, and “more than a few” alt-rightists even claim some relationship to libertarianism – or once had one before sadly shedding their libertarianism later on.

What are the differences in outlook between alt-right ideology and libertarianism? Jeffrey Tucker reckons they come down to five – five different views on history, humanity, order, on trade & migration, and on emancipation & progress:

1. The Driving Force of History
Every ideology has a theory of history, some sense of a driving theme that causes episodic movements from one stage to another. Such a theory helps us make sense of the past, present, and future…

Ayn Rand argued that what drives history most fundamentally is ideas, of which reason and liberty are the most potent, but are by no means inevitable.

There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas. If you know a man’s convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice. There is no fatalistic, predetermined historical necessity.

Libertarian Murray Rothbard reckoned the specifically libertarian story of history is of that liberty against power. “I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself,” he said, “(or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilisation, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity. Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilised life.”

The alt-right reject this outright. On the question of liberty versus power, they come down completely on the side of power.

The movement inherits a long and dreary tradition of thought from Friedrich Hegel to Thomas Carlyle to Oswald Spengler to Madison Grantto Othmar Spann to Giovanni Gentile to Trump’s speeches. This tradition sees something else going on in history: not liberty vs. power, but something like a more meta struggle that concerns impersonal collectives of tribe, race, community, great men, and so on.
    Whereas libertarianism speaks of individual choice, alt-right theory draws attention to collectives on the move. It imagines that despite appearances, we all default in our thinking back to some more fundamental instinct about our identity as a people, which is either being shored up by a more intense consciousness or eroded by a deracination and dispossession from what defines us. To criticise this as racist is often true but superficial. What’s really going on here is the depersonalisation of history itself: the principle that we are all being buffeted about by Olympian historical forces beyond our control as mere individuals. It takes something mighty and ominous like a great leader, an embodiment of one of these great forces, to make a dent in history’s narrative.

Hence the union of white identity politics (an inversion of the identity politics of their political opponents) and the wistful longing for their “man on horseback” to wall out the barbarian hordes.

2. Harmony vs. Conflict

A related issue concerns our capacity to get along with each other. Frédéric Bastiat described the free society as characterised by a “harmony of interests.” In order to overcome the state of nature, we gradually discover the capacity to find value in each other. The division of labour is the great fact of human community: the labour of each of us becomes more productive in cooperation with others, and this is even, or rather especially, true given the unequal distribution of talents, intelligence, and skills, and differences over religion, belief systems, race, language, and so on.
    And truly, this is a beautiful thing to discover. The libertarian marvels at the cooperation we see in a construction project, an office building, a restaurant, a factory, a shopping mall, to say nothing of a city, a country, or a planet. The harmony of interests doesn’t mean that everyone gets along perfectly, but rather than we inhabit institutions that incentivise progress through ever more cooperative behavior. As the liberals of old say, we believe that the “brotherhood of man” is possible.
    The libertarian believes that the best and most wonderful social outcomes are not those planned, structured, and anticipated, but rather the opposite.
    To the alt-right mind, this all seems ridiculous. Sure, shopping is fine. But what actually characterises human association is deep-rooted conflict. The races are secretly at war, intellectually and genetically. There is an ongoing and perpetual conflict between the sexes. People of different religions must fight and always will, until one wins. Nations fight for a reason: the struggle is real.

The libertarian understands that when force is barred from human interaction and all human interaction is voluntary, that each other individual is a net benefit to us, For the alt-righter however, every other human being is a threat, especially those who are “not like us.”

Hence their inevitable racism, a “barnyard” form of collectivism  -- “ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors. Racism;” explains Rand, “claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control.”

Hence for them society is irretrievably divided “vertically” on racial lines, over which each tribe is determinedly in conflict. Ludwig von Mises captures this parallel brilliantly in his identification that, “Nationalist ideology divides society vertically; the socialist ideology divides society horizontally.”

As Tucker observes, “Here, as with many other areas, the far right and far left are strangely aligned.”

3. Designed vs. Spontaneous Order
    The libertarian believes that the best and most wonderful social outcomes are not those planned, structured, and anticipated, but rather the opposite. Society is the result of millions and billions of small acts of rational self interest that are channelled into an undesigned, unplanned, and unanticipated order that cannot be conceived by a single mind. The knowledge that is required to put together a functioning social order is conveyed through institutions: prices, manners, mores, habits, and traditions that no one can consciously will into existence. There must be a process in place, and stable rules governing that process, that permit such institutions to evolve, always in deference to the immutable laws of economics.
    Again, the alt-right mind finds all of this uninspired and uninspiring. Society in their conception is built by the will of great thinkers and great leaders with unconstrained visions of what can be. What we see out there operating in society is a result of someone’s intentional and conscious planning from the top down.
    If we cannot find the source, or if the source is somehow hiding, we imagine that it must be some shadowy group out there that is manipulating outcomes – and hence the alt-right’s obsession with conspiracy theory. The course of history is designed by someone, so “we” might as well engage in the great struggle to seize the controls – and hence the alt-right obsession with politics as a contact sport.
    Oh, and, by the way, economics is a dismal science.

4. Trade and Migration
Of course the classical liberals fought for free trade and free migration of peoples, seeing national borders as arbitrary lines on a map that mercifully restrain the power of the state but otherwise inhibit the progress of prosperity and civilisation. To think globally is not a bad thing, but a sign of enlightenment. Protectionism is nothing but a tax on consumers that inhibits industrial productivity and sets nations at odds with each other. The market process is a worldwide phenomenon that indicates an expansion of the division of labor, which means a progressive capacity of people to enhance their standard of living and ennoble their lives.
    The alt-right is universally opposed to free trade and free migration. You can always tell a writer is dabbling in alt-right thought (or neoreactionary or Dark Enlightenment or outright fascism) if he or she has an intense focus on immigration or international trade as inherently bad or fraudulent or regrettable in some sense. To them, a nation must be strong enough to thrive as an independent unit, an economic or cultural sovereignty unto itself.
    Today, the alt-right has a particular beef with trade deals, not because they are unnecessarily complex or bureaucratic (which are good reasons to doubt their merit) but because of their meritorious capacity to facilitate international cooperation. And it is the same with immigration. Beginning at some point in the late 19th century, migration came to be seen as a profound threat to national identity, which invariably means racial identity.

5. Emancipation and Progress

The libertarian celebrates the profound changes in the world from the late Middle Ages to the age of laissez faire, because we observed how commercial society broke down the barriers of class, race, and social isolation, bringing rights and dignity to ever more people. Slavery was ended. Women were emancipated, as marriage evolved from conquest and dominance into a free relationship of partnership and consent. This is all a wonderful thing, because rights are universal, which is to say, they rightly belong to everyone equally. Anything that interferes with people’s choices holds them back and hobbles the progress of prosperity, peace, and human flourishing. This perspective necessarily makes the libertarian optimistic about humanity’s potential.
    The alt-right mind can’t bear this point of view, and regards it all as naive. What appears to be progress is actually loss: loss of culture, identity, and mission. They look back to what they imagine to be a golden age when elites ruled and peons obeyed. And thus we see the source of their romantic attachment to authority as the source of order, and the longing for authoritarian political rule. As for universal rights, forget it. Rights are granted by political communities and are completely contingent on culture. The ancients universally believed that some were born to serve and some to rule, and the alt-right embraces this perspective. Here again, identity is everything and the loss of identity is the greatest crime against self anyone can imagine.

It should be obvious from Tucker’s analysis that where libertarians view each of us individuals with the power to think and choose, the Alt-Right views each of us instead as part of a “tribe,” our identity irretrievably given us at birth and needing “leadership” to be grafted into its proper whole.

So while libertarianism is indivualistic, the alt-right is demonstrably collectivist. This on its own should stop the mainstream media from lumping us all together. (Yeah right.) And make no mistake, says Tucker: the alt-right knows exactly who its enemies are, and we libertarians are among them. 

To Tucker’s five main differences I would add two more: two contrasting views on The Power of Reason and The Impotence of Evil.

Following Rand, Libertarian Objectivists recognise both the power of Reason and the impotence of Evil – recognising reason to be not just the driving force of history but man’s unique means of survival and flourishing, and evil (being its negation) being essentially parasitic, unable even to survive without mooching on those it would seek to destroy. (This is just one reason a religion like Islam essentially resides in the moral, cultural and historical vacuum created by others, and always has.)

The Alt-Right however consciously reject this thesis. For them it is not man’s mind that has power in the world but his blood. They repair instead to the notion that “intelligence,” culture and all values are simply a product of race, over which none of us has any control; and they see themselves as the true guardians of “white culture,” which is beset on all sides by evil hordes who cannot be reasoned with yet who somehow possess the power and the means to destroy us.

Evil itself has power therefore, and humanity itself becomes our enemy.(“Humanity as a whole is still sub-human” says one former NZ Objectivist, who desperately need to be “wiped out” by some “intervening cataclysm” so that “we” can start over.)

The irony is that in talking up the power of those forces they feel are arrayed against them, so powerful that they must be banned, barred, wiped out and walled out, they implicity stress both power of evil and the impotence of reason to address its challenges; they argue for the power of the culture they damn and the weakness of the culture with which they identify to stand up to those forces. In other words then, the culture they protect they view implicitly as weak and cowardly, and the “intelligence” that they so fitfully measure has no power for them to ultimately move the world.

In that then, the alt-right is not just a racist movement of un-reason, it is one of irredeemable cowardice.

UPDATE:

Objectivist Amy Peikoff discusses the Alt-Right with Stuart Hayashi, who’s recently been analysing Stefan Molyneux’s brand of “race realism”:

 

 

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