Comments (23)

• Ulrich Hobelmann

  "[...] but in the end you would abandon these beloved chimeras, you would overcome your repugnance, and you would come over to us."

  and Socialist I once was, I did. Thanks liberty!

  It's interesting and at the same time sad to see how we aren't the slightest bit more "advanced" than mankind was 150 years ago, nor are our political systems better (when they are arguably much worse!) than back then.

  The same old lies are being perpetuated by men who don't understand a bit of economics, and the blind cry against the force of globalization (that is also hardly new) only amplifies their power.

  Published: March 24, 2006 8:34 AM

• Paul Marks

  The sad thing is that these words of Molinari would be better understood (or less badly misunderstood) by most Americans in 1848 than they would be now.

  For all the support of the Whigs for trade taxes and internal improvements (i.e. taxpayer subsidies for companies in the construction business) even they would have understood something of what Molinari is saying.

  And Northern Democrats (leaving aside Southern slave owners) would have understood and supported much of what he says. The "Barnburner" Democratic faction of New York State (who gave their support to Martin Van Buren) would have supported every word.

  Today I doubt whether any Democrats would understand (let alone support) what Molinari says here. And very few Republicans would support him either (Ron Paul is one who would).

  Even in France the majority of the population in 1848 (the small farmers) were closer to Molinari (at least in terms of tax and sound money - if not in trade)than most French people are now.

  Today when the government suggests easing its regulations on contracts of employement for young people (in order to give them some chance of finding work), not only are there riots (there are always riots from rent-a-mob in any country), but the great majority of the voters say they oppose the suggestion of easing the regulations.

  "Rights" are no longer protections from government. Today (in the eyes of most people)"rights" are nice benefits that it is the duty of government to provide.

  Published: March 24, 2006 11:34 AM

• Tom Woods

  Thanks for this, Roderick. Rothbardian on so many levels. Is this the first time the essay is appearing in English, to your knowledge?

  Published: March 24, 2006 11:35 AM

• tom vw

  Tom Woods:
  
  
  
  I know that this essay has been on Roderick Long's Heritage of Dissent page for quite some time: "The Utopia of Liberty"
  
  
  
  I don't know how long it's been up there, but I can remember seeing the link a few months ago on the Molinari Institute site.
  
  
  
  I find it hard to believe somebody didn't translate Molinari's work prior to Roderick Long's translation. But then again, "obscure" is an adjective that could be used to describe Molinari.

  Published: March 24, 2006 1:19 PM

• tom vw

  PS - sorry about the extra spaces. It looked correct in the preview...

  Published: March 24, 2006 1:21 PM

• Plowman

  I like the opposition of Economists and Socialists. It nicely puts all opponents of the free market into the Socialist category, where they probably belong. The only problem with this piece is its empirical nature. I think it is important to illustrate the effects of liberty on the common laborer (such as myself!), but the empirical nature of the argument could just as easily "prove" that rising living standards in the 20th century are attributeable to the massive increase in socialization during this time. Hoppe has of course corrected this argument to say that the market has thrived in spite of, not because of a lack of liberty. Molinari's argument in this paper, while true enough, does not prove anything, despite his claim to do just this. Of course, an empirical argument is probably more persuasive to the socialists he is trying to convince, but he should have claimed only to persuade, not prove.

  Published: March 24, 2006 2:15 PM

• Ulrich Hobelmann

  Paul, at least in recent decades it can be seen that the USA, for most of the time one of the freest countries on earth, became the richest. Both the USA and (western) Germany acquired phenomenal wealth when they were more liberalized, while now - that everything is being more socialized and/or regulated - both are on the way down (and, accordingly, in the USA upward mobility for people from the lower classes has been much reduced in recent times).

  Socialists don't care about this but rather point to the inherent evilness of capitalism, by blaming everything that's going badly in the world on it. Likewise, every example of bad privatizations is brought up as an example of failing capitalism, even though a clever economist would quickly see that most of these failures have nothing to do with capitalism, but are the result of other mistakes.

  Seriously; if Socialists would ever argue, or study serious arguments, they'd do as I do and switch sides, instead of repeating the tired old "yes, but it's evil" whine. Instead they might like to study how to increase Good in a - capitalist - world, to actually bring their (and mine) ideals to the people they claim to want to help.

  Published: March 24, 2006 2:32 PM

• Wirkman Virkkala

  Most leftists, today, have abandoned abundance as a goal. Oh, sure, in their private lives they like the abundance of modern civilization, but they excoriate that abundance in political speech. They argue against capitalism because it succeeds by old socialist standards. Now man is the enemy, the destroyer of the planet, and socialism has morphed into a soft of anti-socialism. Totalitarianism is the means to curb man's rapacity, and keeping humans lean and not fat, that's the new ethic.

  Molinari's preaching would reach only those very few socialists left, today, who haven't abandoned abundance for containment of "cancerous" civilization.

  Published: March 24, 2006 2:40 PM

• Roderick T. Long

  Tom Woods: "Is this the first time the essay is appearing in English, to your knowledge?"

  Yes. (For French-readers, check out the original French version here. Also, any suggestions/corrections from more fluent Francophones would be welcome; the only merit I claim for my French-to-English translations is that they're better than nothing.)

  tom vw: "I don't know how long it's been up there, but I can remember seeing the link a few months ago on the Molinari Institute site."

  According to the Molinari news page, it went up on July 21st, 2005.

  tom vw: "I find it hard to believe somebody didn't translate Molinari's work prior to Roderick Long's translation."

  In the 19th century two of Molinari's books were translated: The Society of Tomorrow and Religion. (The text of the former is available online; the latter is hard to find, though I've managed to track down a copy and will put it up eventually.) But the translation of The Society of Tomorrow is really quite awful, while the translation of Religion is highly abridged. (Plus, both translations contain introductions by authors with little understanding of or sympathy with Molinari.)

  In the 20th century two further Molinari pieces were translated: The Production of Security by Hu McCulloch, and Chapter 11 of the Soirées by David Hart. Those are the articles where Molinari first sets forth his theory of competing protection agencies, and the translations are good.

  So that's it, as far as I can determine: two books, one article, and one chapter.

  In the present century, in addition to "The Utopia of Liberty" I've translated The Feeding of Paris During the Siege, the first chapters of the Soirées and Greatness and Decline of War. More to follow!

  tom vw: "But then again, 'obscure' is an adjective that could be used to describe Molinari."

  He's obscure now, but the more research I do, the more references I find to him in the late 19th century. People like Lord Acton, Thorstein Veblen, and Henry James reviewed his books; James calls Molinari "a well-known political and economical writer."

  Plowman: "I like the opposition of Economists and Socialists. It nicely puts all opponents of the free market into the Socialist category, where they probably belong."

  Of course it depends what one means by "socialism." Free-market anarchists like Benjamin Tucker called themselves "voluntary socialists" (meaning they wanted to achieve workers' control of industry, but by free-market means), and Tucker's periodical Liberty gave a positive review to The Society of Tomorrow.

  Plowman: "The only problem with this piece is its empirical nature. ... Molinari's argument in this paper, while true enough, does not prove anything, despite his claim to do just this."

  Well, Molinari isn't so much offering arguments in this short piece as he is inviting his opponent to investigate a larger literature. He did write a number of lengthy works, like his two-volume Course of Political Economy (online, but only in French), as well as the afore-mentioned Soirées and numerous other works, in which he attempted to demonstrate the superiority of free markets in much fuller detail.

  Wirkman Virkkala: "Most leftists, today, have abandoned abundance as a goal. ... Molinari's preaching would reach only those very few socialists left, today, who haven't abandoned abundance for containment of 'cancerous' civilization."

  It's certainly true that many leftists today have embraced various forms of anti-technological primitivism, but "most" seems too strong. Certainly most of the leftists I know aren't primitivists.

  Published: March 24, 2006 3:39 PM

• Dain

  Maybe it's just the particular west coast form of socialism I run into alot being in Sacramento, but I can concur with Wirkman's idea about anti-technological, anti-growth (though not exactly anti-civilization) socialism being dominant, at least as a popular casual opinion. (STATE Socialism, just to clarify.) Complaints about cars, roads, homes, and further development of most kinds at the edges of the city are frowned upon. People seem to basically lament that the city is growing, with all the new hordes of people it brings.

  Published: March 24, 2006 4:38 PM

• Roderick T. Long

  Oh well, California leftists, sure. ;-)

  Published: March 24, 2006 4:59 PM

• Philipp Schumann

  Paul: "Hoppe has of course corrected this argument to say that the market has thrived in spite of, not because of a lack of liberty."

  Can someone point me towards the relevant works of Hoppe (or others) disproving non-empirically "that rising living standards in the 20th century are attributeable to the massive increase in socialization during this time"?

  Published: March 24, 2006 11:12 PM

• Paul Edwards

  “…Free-market anarchists like Benjamin Tucker called themselves "voluntary socialists" (meaning they wanted to achieve workers' control of industry, but by free-market means)…�

  Roderick,

  The term “voluntary socialist� strikes me as a stark contradiction in terms. And if what Tucker advocated was essentially that “second meaning of the term syndicalism� as Mises describes in “Human Action�, then, would you agree that Tucker was not an economist?

  After all, according to Mises,

  “… one cannot take the syndicalist program seriously, and nobody ever has. Nobody has been so confused and injudicious as to advocate syndicalism openly as a social system.�
  

  Published: March 25, 2006 12:49 PM

• Paul Edwards

  Philipp,

  A disproof of this proposition is not possible:

  "that rising living standards in the 20th century are attributeable to the massive increase in socialization during this time"

  on the other hand, a proof of its validity is also not possible.

  Furthermore! What we can prove is that with no coercion, with a free and unhampered market, and with no state, that ex ante, there is necessarily a net social gain.

  In contrast, where there is coercion there is not necessarily a net social gain and there certainly could be a net social loss.

  The reason for this is that we know that when two people voluntarily exchange, both benefit. Multiply that by the entire economy and the same applies.

  However, when one is coerced, since value is not absolutely measurable, we cannot know if the loss to the victim is greater than the gain to the criminal and his beneficiaries. Again, multiply this uncertainty by the entire economy and again the same obtains.

  So, while it is a very near certainly that we are worse off due to the state, it is not provable.
  

  Published: March 25, 2006 1:10 PM

• Paul Edwards

  That's from an economic perspective. But what we can show, thanks to Hoppe, is that coercion, aggression, and the state are all unjustifiable from an ethical perspective. And that's certainly no small accomplishment and more important, in my mind, than showing these things hurt us economically.

  Published: March 25, 2006 1:23 PM

• Philipp Schumann

  Certainly---and thanks!

  It's just that when I talk about liberalism people keep referring me to the years of early industrialization in England (1750+) and say, "your principles were in effect at that time and look at the historic evicence how worse off the majority of people were---until they organized themselves and the state got a strong hold on [education / health / insert 'public good' here]... so I'm sort of looking for evidence other than always refuting that true liberal principles were in fact in place, which is a bit like some socialist responding to "look at all the poor socialist countries" by saying "well that's not the real thing, it's not true socialism / communism, it's hampered by international embargoes blabla"... =)

  You know, people keep discussing in empirical terms, and I can't convince them to accept a priori arguments and logic. Kind of sad. Then of course, rather than asking me for them in the first place they keep complaining about how I would let lonely, poor grammies starve which kind of kills the discussion anyway. =)

  Published: March 25, 2006 5:46 PM

• averros

  Philipp,

  "that rising living standards in the 20th century are attributeable to the massive increase in socialization during this time"

  You should add couple hundred million people killed (and the high risk of extinction of humans created) by the increasingly socialized states during this time.

  I do not think having a car in every driveway ever comes close to compensating the megamurder in the "living standards" calculation.
  

  Published: March 25, 2006 7:31 PM

• Brian Drum

  Philipp,

  You may want to take a look at Dr. DiLorenzo's How Capitalism Saved America.

  Published: March 25, 2006 9:53 PM

• Peter

  Your principles were in effect at that time and look at the historic evicence how worse off the majority of people were

  Were they? They were worse off than they are now, which is hardly surprising, but what makes the people who say this to you think they were worse off than they were before, or would have been otherwise?

  Published: March 26, 2006 12:46 AM

• Plowman

  Philipp: I think you should read "Democracy: The God that Failed" if you haven't already. I don't have a copy of the book so maybe somebody else can help me out, but I think this argument appears in the introduction, or very early on in the work. It is not an a priori argument, and I'm not sure exactly how to characterize it: perhaps an historical argument? I think the argument goes like this: socialism is a net drain on the market (theoretically, in economics), and so with this theory we can postulate that empirical evidence of rising living standards in the 20th century must have occurred in spite of, not because of, socialization. I find this to be a good argument, but since it taps into the empirical realm, it does not offer the certainty of an a priori argument.

  Roderick: Thanks for making this work available to us. Regarding your comment above, I was hoping from the early context of this article ("Well then, if we prove to you with sufficient clarity that all the evils which you attribute to liberty...") that Molinari was going to offer a proof in this work, as opposed to his historical/empirical references in it. I'm not sure how such a "proof" would go, so I still very much enjoyed the article. It just occurred to me that the examples Molinari gives in this piece do not differ greatly from arguments that attribute rising standards of living in the 20th century to Unioninization, Anti-trust, "public" education, etc. I realize it is a very short piece, but I just thought that he shouldn't combine the word "prove" with the style of argument used in it.

  Published: March 26, 2006 3:49 AM

• Paul Edwards

  Philipp,

  I have been stewing over your question and my answer and I thought I might recant, and on reviewing it, I will. At least, I do not think I answered the real question. The real question I think, rather than a rise in total social utility, the question is really of increasing total labor productivity and therefore increasing total material wealth. And to that I really think I answered very wrongly.

  So let me try again! (Sorry).

  "that rising living standards in the 20th century are attributable to the massive increase in socialization during this time"

  Or…

  "that rising labor productivity in the 20th century are attributable to the massive increase in socialization during this time"

  Or…

  "that rising net material wealth in the 20th century are attributable to the massive increase in socialization during this time"

  All necessarily false! Why. Let’s take it in steps:

  1. It is necessarily increased savings and investment in capital that increases labor productivity and overall wealth.

  2. Government spending is necessarily wasteful consumption spending because it is not spent on capital in the pursuit of profit. It is spent for the pleasure of the politician, the bureaucrat, and their favored interests.

  3. Tax money confiscated cannot be saved and invested productively by the productive sector; and a ratio of it necessarily would have been had it not been taxed away and wasted. This therefore necessarily reduces net savings and capital investment and therefore, it necessarily reduces labor productivity and material wealth.

  4. Furthermore, it is necessarily the case that taxation reduces the effective income of the productive sector to the benefit of the parasitic sector.

  5. This reduction in income necessarily results in an increased time preference because life is more tenuous and savings is a smaller ratio of total income due to taxation.

  6. An increase in time preference again results in an increased ratio of consumption spending over savings and capital investment and hence results in lower productivity and wealth generation.

  Therefore, the following is necessarily false:

  "that rising material wealth in the 20th century is attributable to the massive increase in socialization during this time"

  I apologize for the lousy initial answer. I don’t know what got me thinking along that tangent.
  

  Published: March 26, 2006 1:50 PM

• Thomas Van Wyk

  First, thanks to Dr. Long for your responses. Second, thanks also to Dr. Long for making available the wonderful resource, "The Heritage of Dissent." My to-read list grows still larger!

  Just a question to whoever might know:

  Finally got around to reading "A Letter to the Socialists", and I'm wondering - why did Molinari at first publish the letter anonymously? Fear of sabots?

  Would putting his name on the letter have been proverbial "academic suicide?" After all, it is strong language aimed directly at the socialists, and socialism of several types did hold quite a bit of sway during the Industrial Revoultion (at least, that is, according to my past history classes).

  Thanks,
  Thomas Van Wyk
  http://liberator.blogspot.com

  Published: March 26, 2006 7:11 PM

• Artisan

  Quite a good translation here. No need to work at it more I'd say, as a francophone (with partly Belgian blood too!). I started reading the French then the English to compare the quality, then came back to the French as I thought there was no difference, while it is easier for me... You must think this is 1850 language though, so it sounds a bit unusual to French ears too.

  As for the content, it really sounds like a letter. Great eloquence I would say, and very superficial argumentation indeed. To me, the depiction of living conditions in ancient Egyptian times (recently I heard though that the whole theory about unskilled slaves building pyramids while sweating blood was quite inaccurate), or ancient Rome, changing all at once with the 1789 revolution, makes me wonder how much the idea of progress is in one’s head only… because slaves still existed in America, even in 1948 while there were still serfs in Russia. … Probably I don’t understand quite the context in which this is written though.

  I always tended to think that the real social progress began with industrialization of medicine… together with scientific progress in that field. Make it affordable for poor people to cure themselves must be the real and only social progress you can objectively quantify. Is it due to the progress of liberty…? Certainly. The Church (and State) bigotry were a major obstacle here, especially before 1789.

  Published: March 28, 2006 3:59 AM