This collection won’t be released for a while but I can’t help pointing this out. It is the full issue of American Affairs, 1945, volume 1 but note that it contains a review of Mises’s Omnipotent Government and Bureaucracy by…Garet Garrett. Working on making this a daily article.
“LUDWIG VON MISES writes tragedy in the language of political economy.”
“Since the eclipse of the classical economists no writer has more powerfully or with fewer misgivings defended free private capitalism, not only as the system that works and contains within itself the mechanisms of self-correction, but as a social philosophy.”
A special thank you to BK Marcus for staying up late last night to make this wonderful review available. So far as I know, its existence has only been noted in B. Greaves Mises’s Bibliography but not previously attributed to Garrett. FULL ARTICLE
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It never ceases to amaze me how poignant and prophetic are the ideas of these giants of Austrian Economics. Their observations are timeless, and their lessons apply today as much as ever…perhaps more so now than ever. I grow ever more appreciative of the work of LvMI in advancing these ideas. The task is difficult, but so very worthwhile.
Thank you, Jeff, and BK Blogster, and the rest of the good folk at LvMI for another in your long line of good deeds.
Wonderful article.
I am not sure how any reader can read an article from 1945 telling us that there is no third way. There clearly is and we have been living in such a system for well over half a century since.
As long as man has just enough liberty to overcome the drag that the statists impose there will be progress, albeit worse than what would otherwise have been.
The choice is not binary.
Mises/Garrett would SEEM not to have anticipated what is called the “post-war prosperity” that followed World War II.
Now, this prosperity, which was real enough, did not quite refute Mises’s arguments – counterfactually, it was MUCH attenuated by the (also true) factors that led Mises to such a gloomy (“capital consumption”) outlook (Omnipotent Government was published in 1944).
But it was strong enough to OVERCOME the negative factors and, at least in the US and Western Europe, lead demonstrably to considerable capital ACCUMULATION in the period he would appear to have been talking about. Of course, he lived to see this, and he may have commented on it, too.
Mises is better known to me for CORRECT predictions (demise of the USSR), but this prediction would appear at least to have been overcome by events he did not foresee, if it wasn’t outright wrong.
Who is to say that Mises was wrong in his prediction? Countries like Sweden are already suffering from maturing economies.
I believe the end is yet to be seen. Yes, the U.S. is among the top five countries in the world in terms of economic freedom (http://www.heritage.org/index/topten.cfm), so we have prospered more greatly relative to countries that are less economically free. But as pointed out in other comments, this prosperity has come in spite of the vast restrictions placed upon the economy by government. Who can say how much more greatly we would have prospered in the absence of such restriction? Also, who can say whether the collapse of the third way may yet occur. I think it’s too early to tell.
Making the link work correctly…
http://www.heritage.org/index/topten.cfm
Ron, precisely. Mises made a qualitative, not a quantititative, prediction. Mixed economies are still relatively young in the general scope of things and may yet collapse later in time than a full-blown collectivist system.
Lets face it. Collectivism is on the march still.
The same forces of confiscating private property
are still with us more so in ever more convoluted manners.
Reason was not able to prevent this march to ever more Etatism. It was not the fault of lack of Reason but the unidentified thrust of the fault of the Judeo-Christian Ethics of Self-Sacrifice as a moral Ideal to strive for.
The public in general has been indoctrinated to accept that Ideal of Self-Sacrifice and unfortunately we are reaping its disastrous consequences a little more each passing day.
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