The Socialists still attacking Mises
Hey, the commies are attacking Mises! But the article has all the expected confusions, like conflating public and private bureaucracy. Some stuff here is actually quite right: "In spite of the move away from public ownership and toward private ownership, governments around the world have continued to take taxpayers’ money and essentially use it to subsidize private industry and to enhance the instruments of repression and war."
Umm, right, and Misesians are against that.
Comments (10)
MLS
It's funny how they discuss public health care, and nowhere present is the the fact that the government does NOT create medicine. Seeking to exclusively pick various medicines from well-established firms in the private sector (common government procedure) creates massive bureaucracy in the wake. That is not even mentioning the mediocrity of public health care, nor the fact that it merely breads more people in need of health care.
Published: November 9, 2005 4:37 PM
bkmarcus
You know, I hate it when these commies call us neoliberals. I'm a paleoliberal. www.paleoliberal.com
As Tom DiLorenzo says, "Marxists [are] constitutionally unable to distinguish between free enterprise and special privilege." (How Capitalism Saved America, p. 45)
How much ignorance does it take to say that Mises's ideology has won!?
Published: November 9, 2005 5:46 PM
Jim Waddell
The article also refers to Mises as a sociologist rather than an economist. His economic statements must thus be suspect, probably downright wrong.
Published: November 9, 2005 5:50 PM
Nick
At: bkmarcus. I rather would call myself a classical liberal. Is that not the same?
Published: November 9, 2005 6:30 PM
KV
Hilariously, there's a socialist David Gordon cited in the article.
Published: November 9, 2005 7:37 PM
bkmarcus
Nick, yes and no. When social democrats started to appropriate the term 'liberal' in the early 20th century, several retronyms were coined to keep the distinction, including laissez-faire liberal, market liberal, old liberal, and your own preferred classical liberal. The problem is that many of the self-labeled classical liberals — then as now — are actually neoliberals: far less laissez-faire than the 19th-century liberals they claim as ideological forebears. Hayek himself, for example, expressly rejected laissez-faire. When the Mont Pelerin Society members began to be commonly referred to as neoliberals, Ludwig von Mises wrote in correspondence that he was a paleoliberal, in contradistinction to the neos he considered to be cowardly compromisers. With all the neoliberals, neoconservatives, neolibertarians, paleoconservatives, and paleolibertarians out there, I thought it was time to resurrect the term 'paleoliberal' to emphasize the uncompromising connection to the centuries-old tradition of laissez faire et laissez passer.
Published: November 9, 2005 9:15 PM
Travis
"wealth drawn from the sweat of workers..."
(see post on Socialist Workers website)
What colossal ignorance. Labor does not create value. Entrepreneurs create the value. They assmble the capital and knowledge that provide
a means for labor to work. Without the entrepreneur, labor is a blob of individuals sitting on their duff waiting for direction.
Travis
Published: November 10, 2005 4:38 AM
Gregory Swift
BKMarcus implies that Mises's ideology hasn't won. Oh yeah? Explain Haliburton then. Isn't that the free market at work?
Published: November 10, 2005 4:07 PM
Alan Gifford
Greg, in order to contest BKMarcus's comment, it might help to first understand what Mises said about the free market. That's why he (BK) called the article's author ignorant; because like yours, his statement makes it obvious that he was in severe lack of any detailed information of what Mises believed.
I don't really know the details of the Halliburton situation, but in my view, the very fact that most of (or a lot of) their money comes directly from the government pretty much takes any idea of "free market" out of the equation. Since tax money is taken by force, counter to the _freedom_ of its owners, you cannot attribute its uses to the _free_ market.
Just because the money is used by an entity that technically is private does not change the fact that it was not given freely by the people, nor the fact that it also was not spent at the direction of the people. This means it is not really free market activity at all.
So in my mind, and I imagine Mises would agree (based on knowledge of his ideals, something that you obviously lack), Halliburton is a defacto arm of the government.
Even simpler: no, Mises would not view Halliburton as a product of the free market.
Published: November 10, 2005 7:37 PM
Paul Edwards
"How much ignorance does it take to say that Mises's ideology has won!?"
Someone is saying Mises's ideology has won? LOL! That really did make me laugh.
Published: March 22, 2006 2:06 PM