Man is, as Aristotle said, the social animal, not because he is kind-hearted and community-minded. Homo sapiens is social, kind-hearted, and community-minded precisely because he is sapient: wise enough to understand that his own interests are better served through cooperation and peace than through isolation and predation.
Mises’s efforts to refute market socialist proposals nearly a century ago were explicitly validated with the decline and fall of Soviet socialism. Presently, they’re being openly validated with the utter chaos being heaped upon the people of Venezuela. Indeed, the results of government intervention are always the same, stagnation, inflation, declining living standards, and widespread social disorder.
The practical application of liberal principles multiplied population figures and, in the countries committed to the policies of economic freedom, secured even to less capable and less industrious people a standard of living higher than that of the well-to-do of the “good old” days.
The occasion for yesterday's political violence was another pro-Trump rally in Berkeley celebrating “Patriot’s Day.” As usual, it was the leftists who were the main instigators. That doesn’t alter the fact that these gradually-escalating street conflicts signal a two-pronged threat to liberty. Mises's account of the collapse of Weimar Germany explains why.
"With the World War mankind got into a crisis with which nothing that happened before in history can be compared. There were great wars before; flourishing states were annihilated, whole peoples exterminated. All that can in no way be compared with what is now occurring before our eyes." ~ Ludwig von Mises
Right Wing “Patriots" — Usurers Inc.Your editor briefly stopped by the Independent Idaho Republicans conference held at a local hotel here in Coeur d’Alene over the weekend. The meeting might just as well have billed itself as Usurers Inc. or Shylock and Co., so numerous were the members of the Birchers, Mormons, Ludwig Von Mises Austrian School of Economics and Ayn Rand institute for enlightened godless selfishness. (Like Rand, Von Mises also detested Christ).
On the August 2, 2014 episode of Exposing Faux Capitalism with Jason Erb, I discussed: More analysis of The Gold Standard: Perspectives in the Austrian School (pp. 20-25), with Rothbard’s critique of a basket of currencies, bi-metallic standard and case for a single commodity gold standard.
From this January 25, 2014 New York Times hit piece against Rand Paul and Mises Institute associates, Lew Rockwell told a New York Times reporter who requested a tour of the Mises Institute campus that he’s “part of the regime“, yet Lew Rockwell himself is the Chairman of a government-sanctioned and government-regulated institution, the 501(c)(3) […]
