Marxism Unmasked
In June and July 1952, Ludwig von Mises delivered nine lectures in San Francisco on Marxism and capitalism. Bettina Greaves transcribed these lectures, and she has done us a great service in making these lectures available to the public. They display Mises's unparalleled insight, and even experienced students of him will learn much from what he says here. Economics of course lies at the heart of Marxism, and Mises expertly exposes Marx's key errors. FULL ARTICLE
Comments (10)
Barry Loberfeld
What's Really Reactionary? by Barry LoberfeldNo one ever claimed that 1993's Rising Sun was robbed of an Oscar, but the movie did have its moments, especially one where Harvey Keitel's police lieutenant -- a tightly corked, by-the-book kind of guy who's rattled by the looming Japanese corporate takeover of America (again, this was '93) and the latitude he's ordered to show Japanese nationals living here -- starts to rant: "F*** 'em if they break the law! If that brands me as a reactionary.... What does that mean anyway -- 'reactionary'? Is that a dirty word?" For those familiar with the argot of the political Left, it's an effort to suppress a laugh.
In the most general terms, the reactionary out-Herods the conservative by not only opposing historical change, but actually wanting to reverse it ("to revert to an earlier state" -- Webster's). And to understand why that's such a "dirty" thing to Leftists, we have to be familiar with the underpinnings of Leftism: Marxian historical materialism.
In his letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, Karl Marx insisted that "every child" grasped the reality that if a community ceased working, it would soon perish. This was indicative of his fundamental contention that material production to meet basic human needs constitutes the (economic) "structure" -- the foundation -- of society, "on which rise legal and political superstructures.... The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general." This is a "view of history," observes Thomas Sowell, in which "cultural differences -- ultimately, differences in people's thinking -- [are] explain[ed by] ... difference[s] in material advancement, rather than vice versa." Engels summarized it thus:
As Ayn Rand once quipped, Marx's is the notion that the "material tools of production determine men's 'ideological superstructure' (which means: machines create men's thinking, not the other way around)." For those who imagine this a burlesque, elsewhere Engels wrote:
This "mode" develops "itself by the dialectical process of its own 'super-logic' of contradictions" (Rand), which virtually alone turns the gears of history, the mechanics of which men cannot -- and so must not attempt to -- counter. Thus the metaphysic of historical materialism (which Engels applied even to itself, characterizing the ideology-qua-"science" as something that "had to be discovered") begets an amoral "morality" of historical justification. Justice is nothing more than a question of what is "necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production" (Marx). Indeed, "what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity?" And "in the face of new, higher conditions," the present mode of production -- and every one of its "superstructures" -- "loses its validity and justification" (Engels). Progress -- "revolution" -- emerges as Marxism's categorical imperative; reaction -- "counter-revolution" -- its great evil.
How Marx and Engels themselves understood the application to human events of this historicism (when welded to their ideas of class conflict -- discussed below) was made quite explicit:
... But at the first victorious uprising of the French proletariat ... the Austrian Germans and Magyars will be set free and wreak a bloody revenge on the Slav barbarians. The general war which will then break out will smash this Slav Sonderbund and wipe out all these petty hidebound nations....
The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.
This passage, easily mistakable for something culled from Mein Kampf, illustrates a militaristic and genocidal theory that more or less accurately presaged its own future.
As for the suggestion that Marx or Engels hedged here and there, Sowell reminds us:
The foregoing is the skeleton; the "flesh" begins with Marxism's own quasi-Eden, viz., "primitive communism." A concept the formulators of "scientific socialism" distilled from Lewis H. Morgan's intoxicating (and thoroughly unscientific) romanticization of the "noble savage," this is mankind's primordial historical (i.e., economic) stage. "In these societies," explains Robert Heilbroner,
Alas, developing cultures eventually bite the apple of private property rights and the division of labor. Consequently,
And ultimately?
And so, with this end of history -- and of Marx's deterministic historicism -- we can back up to the beginning. Regarding the invocation of Darwin, one writer, Robert B. Downs, points out that by "tying his class-struggle theory of history to Darwin's theory of evolution, Marx gave his ideas respectability and, at the same time, he believed, made them irrefutable." More soberly, it's a bad analogy that makes for worse science. Darwinian evolution, including ongoing human evolution, is a matter of accident; Marxian evolution, a matter of necessity. The former is open-ended, whereas the latter follows a path to a "terminus," as reflected in Marx's frequent metamorphosis metaphors. (Those who point to traces of accident in Marx are, again, pointing to the ad hoc.)
As intimated above, Marx is better compared to the Bible, as are a host of other such Us-vs.-Them collectivist ideologues who posit a Paradise, a fall from grace, and a redemptive return. Hitler (another gutter appropriator of Darwin) poisoned his soul with the dementia of Lanz von Liebenfels. His Ostara propagated the myth of Nordic ur-humans (complete with electrified organs), who spawned the "lower" races when some of their women copulated with apes and whose blond descendants must now fight these half-beasts to regain racial supremacy. The Black Muslims had a reverse mythology, wherein the first humans were black, until an evil scientist among them ("Mr. Yacub") genetically engineered the white race that would then go on to cruelly dominate the world, a reign that would now be crushed by the Muslims themselves. And most recently, "radical" feminists have limned a history of matriarchal antiquity, its conquest by the Learned Elders of Patriarchy, and its imminent restoration -- by the feminists themselves. (See Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.)
But the truly intriguing thing here is how Marxism's "terminus" -- Communism, the "[a]bolition of private property" -- is in fact a return to its starting point: the absence of private property under "primitive communism." Marxian "revolution" is not an advance toward an unprecedented stage of history, but a revolving back to the original. And how is that even possible by Marx's own postulates? How can the stone knife and the precision laser both produce the same "superstructure" of collective ownership and uniformity of labor? How is that anything but itself reactionary?
It is the question to ask of everything Marxist -- and of the entire Left.
FOR THE REST OF THE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE
Published: March 3, 2009 11:41 AM
Renato Bulcao
Behaviorist Marxism
There is a fashionable and up-to-date point of view on Marxism. And this is not because we should start to march again supporting any neocommunist or even neosocialist flag. This would be another waste of time.
Mises is right when he points out this crude materialism that frames all Marxist theories.
But one thing philosophy keep us aware is that the development of any mentality is just to add one good idea to another. If the result is powerful, we just achieve another step commenting Plato's ideas.
The problem by Marx times is that he wrote his ideas more than a century ago. It is just like believing that all philosophers' ideas from the previous centuries are still valid today. They are not. Many of the basic thoughts could be useful to understand the present, but most of them are just good enough to understand the times and costumes of their own era. Just remember Galileo or Newton. Even Kepler and Descartes had fundamental ideas, but neither explained the world, the universe or even the daily life as we experience today.
Marx, I am sorry to say, was a man like any other. He was a brilliant thinker, but no God. Nothing he said could be taken seriously today, out of his historical context. Just like the existence of the soul inside the pineal gland, proven by Descartes, is something to be taken as truth.
But once you get to the statement that, "everybody is forced — by the material productive forces — to think in a way that the result shows his class interests" you very quickly add the idea that class may be not only your economical grade inside a society but also, like any animal, the class of animal you do belong to. We are all classified into different degrees, from male and female, to rich and poor, black or white and so on. All are valid concepts of class.
Once you got the idea that we were born equal but do not behave equally because even the environment and the mentality helps us to develop our humanity into a singularity, it is very obviously that "You think in the way your "interests" force you to think..." You may name it adaptation, survival or else.
Your "interests" may be something independent of your mind and your ideas, but never from your surviving needs.
I agree that consequently the production of ideas is not truth. What the thinking of the people produce in the struggling of surviving is "ideology" not truth.
Marx contended that class interests determine a thinker's ideas. But the modern man should be aware that nobody thinks collectively. Marx also maintained that these ideas directly reflect the material productive forces. Yes, but those ideas mainly reflect also the lack of resources. But these two accounts by no means are the same thing once we have to keep in mind that according to the environment material productive forces do not explain the same situation: just compare someone living by the Amazon River, and another person living near the Sahara.
What are classes in this context? On the other hand, water and access to water are undoubtedly material productive forces.
So, money, credit and banking systems are just instruments for certain societies and environments.
Even if they reach almost any human group in the planet, they are not necessarily a determination for the group's behavior.
Economics of course lies at the heart of Marxism, and Mises expertly exposes Marx's key errors. That is very right when economics is only understand as "the way people' use money, develop industries and trade". But economics is a lot more than that.
Economics is the study of how energy is stored and applied to the very different needs, from human cells to winds blowing over icebergs.
Marx claimed that he had discovered the "law of motion" of capitalism, just as Newton had discovered the laws of motion in physics.
Maybe he has found one important rule for the capitalism of his time. Cooperation and social distribution is a very old human idea. But something that we should keep in mind is that Marx was the first one, long before Darwin, who understood that the principle of distributing limited resources among different individuals of the same species could lead to different developments between them. This is the economics among the splitting of cells, the adaptation of the individuals among the same species: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
There is nothing more neo Darwinist than this thought.
The value of anything depends on the socially necessary time required to get it, not to produce it. This applies to labor as well: the value of labor depends on how much is required to keep a laborer alive and able to work. And value may be expressed in many ways.
If the amount of labor he expends exceeds what the employer has offered him, the employer makes a profit. Just as the efforts an individual makes to survive, does not guarantee any further life: wages are just a measure for the adaptation cost of an individual inside a given society. Actually they are the cheapest efforts in letting a person staying alive in a certain environment. Every time the surviving conditions get uneven, first the individual appeals for alienation, like alcohol or drugs. At the end, they appeal for vital space, and kill.
Mises resolves a question that when socialism arrives, people will no longer be subjected to the division of labor. Surely his knowledge of economic history must have taught him that the humans cannot exist without the division of labor because each individual has different abilities and needs.
Actually there was not such evolution in mankind that could determine if specialized skills are different from the primitive ones. We are still killing with knives and fire, we have just specialized those procedures. But the way to behavior towards the needs, individual, social, affective needs, are still the same. If I don't have it, I get it. Otherwise, I suffer.
Once all these come down to the economic crises and other bubbles, there is still the fear to accept that human economics are apparently regulated by expansion and contractions which could be followed in mathematics’ model expressed as bubbles.
Just like breathing - gases expanding and shrinking our lungs.
If someone would take his time to narrow the time frame of any economic movement across history, as the gold rush, mercantilism or any other, we maybe understand that most of the economic waves if not all of them, where actually bubbles.
Maybe because of poor communication in the past, the bubbles have last longer so people could not understand what was really going on. But from the building of a cathedral over the centuries, to slavery in all the historic periods, bubbles seems to be the collective movement of some societies to force everybody— by the material productive forces — to think in a way that the result shows his class interests, in order to get from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
And maybe this was Marx' contribution for understanding humans and economics.
Renato Bulcao
Published: March 3, 2009 1:46 PM
Owe Steen-Hansen
I have not read the lectures but if your exposé is correct the philosophical competence of Mises is not very good. The mistakes mentioned (at the end) is in itself revealing, but not decisive.
Obviously Mises do not understand the irony of Hegel when he talks of the perspective of God. It is actually what Kant presupposes when he talks about the eternal and inchangeable forms of understanding and perceptions.The transcendentale philosophy of Kant tries to find the the eternal laws of nature in human reason, because Hume had shown that it is not empirically possible to confirm the existence of eternal laws (laws of nature), which Newton postulates as existing.
So Kant tries to show that the basis for the newtonian absolute concepts of time, space and causality is not to be found in experience, but in the reason; that is, in a faculty which is contrasted to the faculties which produces empirical knowledge.
Kant calls the faculty producing synthetic a posteriori jugdements (as the germans calls statements; in german: Urteile) "reproduktive Einbildungskraft".
That faculty producing what Kant is calling pure representations (reine Vorstellungen, reine Anschauungen), and called synthetic a priory statements when articulated in language i.e,. in concepts (Begriffe), is named "produktive Einbildungskraft".
As said above, it is that faculty which is responsible for the pure concepts implicit in a priory synthetic judgements. According to Kant it is three sciences where such concepts are used and that is pure metaphysics, pure mathematics and pure physics.
The pure metaphysical concepts is the triad God, the free will and the immortal soul, which in the Critic of the Practical Reason is treated as practical postulates, because you cannot prove the existence og the three Vorstellungen, but you cannot deny the existence of die drei Vorstellungen (the three representations, a very bad word for the german Vorstellung, which dominates the european metaphysics) and thus you have to show the genesis of them, which Hume did not succed to do according to Kant.
So,actually, you can say that The Critique of Pure Reason is one part the philosophy of religion of Kant; explicitly in "Von dem Ideal des höchsten Guts" p.727 and "Vom Meinen, Wissen und Glauben" p.739. in the pure reason.
It is this way, which defines his transcendental philosophy as a unification or synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, Kant is placing himself between Hume and Descartes. The difference between Kant and Descartes is that the pure representations according to Descartes is innate and inscribed in human reason by God. Because God is good he gave us the ability to look inside our selves and discover the eternal, pure and perfect ideas used by God before and in the creation of the universe. It is the intuition, which already Plato is talking about. (See Theatetos)
When your will is following the intuition, those ideas will be revealed to the mental eye (occula mentalis), which that faculty is also named.
When Hegel is talking of God in the way he does, he is perfectly aware of that he is only articulating the consequences of the kantian philosophy and the hole european metaphysics and theology, but that is not understood by unskilled interpretores who is reading Hegel without that close friendship you have to have with the european tradition. I suppose you are perfectly conscious of the hegelian method called reines Zusehen. He is expressing the implications of Kants philosophy i.e. what Kant has said without saying it, and that concept and that phenomenon which is not known by many people, namely The God of the Philosophers, beginning with Xenophanes and developing up to Hegels period in human history.
That's why you can talk of irony. Read the introduction to The Great Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik) That Logic which is a nice correction of the contradictions in Kants transcendental logic where Kant is moving on the borders nad a little bit in the regions of a dialectical logic. (Die transzendentale Dialektik und Methodenlehre in The critique of Pure Reason. page 334 -650 and 651-766.)
What Hegel actually is discovering because of Kant (it is therefore you can say that in one perpective Hegel is only a consequent kantian, which is said by many.) and because of his looking back to Plato and Aristoteles, is dialectics, but not the negative one, discernable already by Plato. Hegel, in one sense, is becoming a aristotelian, well known among philosophers.
To fully explain this you have to understand the way the consciousness has travelled in The Phenomenology of the Spirit through the dialectics between the master and the slave, through reason, religion, art, enlightenment up to the absolute idea and the absolute knowledge.
In Kants philosohy it is two kinds of absolutes Wissen, both in pure and practical reason. In the last, obviously it is the categorical imperative, the everlasting moral principle which Kant postulates als ein Factum der Vernuft, but which is contradicting the pure reason, because according to that book facts does not exist beyond time, space and causality, and the concepts of morality shall be beyond time etc. Parts of this is the construction of the inexplicable concept of "der intelligible Character" etc. etc. and everything takes us at last ,to the third critique which has to solve all the problem not handled by the two first reasons.
Hegel in using the above mentioned method is explicating the consequences of the european metaphysics since Heraklit and Parmenides up to Schelling, Fichte and Kant. He is playing die Felsenmelodie, also called "immanente Kritik, bestimmte Negation" and "Aufhebung".
You have to understand that evolution in the german idealism to understand Marx. An important figure is Schellings materialism.
When it comes to what Mises is saying about Marx it is the same mess. He only leaves the impression of being a very uneducated man in philosohy.
Most of what he says about Marx is lies. A simple control is to read the eleven thesis to Feuerbach.
When it comes to Mieses talking of labour and division of labour what Mises critizises Marx for, is what Marx says is wrong in Smith.
To me it seems as Mises is that sort of philosopher who knows everything about books he hasn't red.
Read ch. 5 and 13 in The Capital and read Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses and you will soon experience that the following quotations shows that Mises lies. He has not made a scientific investigation in the works of Marx. That is obvious.
"So this Marx didn't take into account the evolution of mankind above the level of very primitive men." (In the beginning of ch 5 in das Kapital he is saying the opposite of what Mises implicates, and he no where says that the a craftsman (Handwerker, who has been the dominant type of labour throughout history until. You will not find a more poetic painting of skilled labour than in the mentioned 5th ch.) or an engineer is unskilled labour). Mises goes on "He considered unskilled labour to be the normal type of labour and skilled labour to be the exception. He wrote in one of his books that progress in the technological improvement of machines causes the disappearance of specialists because the machine can be operated by anyone; it takes no special skill to operate a machine. Therefore the normal type of man in the future will be the non-specialist. (p. 14), this is bullshit if it pretends to be some thing which have to do with Marx and do not forget that Marx said: "I am not a marxist."
Marx is well known to have made the distinction between intellectual and manual labour and he is fully aware of the fact that this distinction in the modern society has developed up to skilled and unskilled labour in the process of production, and developed to that kind of intellectual labour which is necessary to construct machines. Read ch 13. and you will discover that Marx knows a lot more of this stuff than I have the feeling that you yourself is knowing. An educated man as you, I suppose also knows everything about the marxian concept "Totalarbeiter" which implicates a sophisticated organisation of labour in capitalism, both in society and in the "unmittelbare Produktionsprozesses" where it is many different levels of skill.
What he means is what I myself has experienced many times in the different types of industries I myself have worked through my life, that I can do a good job without being prequalified. I have worked in a brewery, in a shipyard, in an aluminium producing factory, on a farm etc. He is talking of a tendency.
"Marx didn't take into account the evolution of mankind above the level of very primitive men. He considered unskilled labor to be the normal type of labor and skilled labor to be the exception. He wrote in one of his books that progress in the technological improvement of machines causes the disappearance of specialists because the machine can be operated by anyone; it takes no special skill to operate a machine. Therefore the normal type of man in the future will be the non-specialist." (p. 14)
Marx is talking of the tendency in modern society because more and more labour is done by machines so the skills previously held by the labourer is injected in the dead matter, if I may say so, and thus you can shout out; “the product is not touched by humans.” He is perfectly aware of the fact that this presupposes scientificly skilled labour, those types made by engineers. Read for yourself, what you obviously have not done. (And I do not like people who gives the impression to know what they do not know. Do not forget Sokrates.)
If you don't know, you have the opportunity to read "Resultate ..", but to be frank I do not believe you will ever open a book of Marx in German or english and read him without your prejudiced eyes.
When it comes to the problem of determination and the often unconscious expression of points of views revealing that you have not reflected upon the presuppositions out of which you are reasoning,
Marx does not say that everybody is doomed their hole life to be victim of being locked into only one limited perspective, but he experiences that that is normal (and that is very easy to see if you read the books from the different schools in economy before and at the time of Marx.) and that most people is not familiar with that what Hegel calls the second reflection (zweites Reflexion, implicated in the negation of the kantian Reflexionsphilosophie.)
The real human perspective is according to Marx beyond the perspective of both classes and that perspective is not what Mannheim talks about. Also here he has learned from Hegel and Plato. Hegel shows that the perspective expressed in Kants philosophy cannot be neither from the masters perspective, nor the slave, because those do not immidiately give the newtonian and the perspective of the cathegorical imperative. They demand an other relation between humans to generate.
But when it comes to those problems with the future, we have to consider that part of Marx where he touches the jewish "Bildverbot", which I suppose you are perfectly familiar with.
Thank you for listening. Obviously it is much more between haven and earth than you have been imaginating.
Best regards,
Owe Steen-Hansen
* It is a lot more to say. But perhaps this words can help you to get rid of some of the shells before your eyes. Experience yourself what he writes.
Published: March 3, 2009 1:54 PM
Inquisitor
"The mistakes mentioned (at the end) is in itself revealing, but not decisive."
"Revealing" of what, considering that they are probably errors in transcription?
Published: March 3, 2009 2:21 PM
Dennis
Mr. Steen-Hansen:
The economics (as differentiated from the dialectical materialism and philosophy of history) of Marx's system adopts and fundamentally rests on classical economics' labor theory of value. The labor theory of value, and hence Marxian economics, was completely discredited over 135 years ago by the subjective theory of value that was crystallized by Carl Menger. Also, you should read Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk critique and demolition of Marx's "exploitation" theory of interest, which again rests on the labor theory of value. Finally, Mises, who by the way is arguably one of the most widely read social scientists of the 20th century, demonstrated that originary interest is logically inherent in the very concept of human action, i.e., an individual's purposive use of means to obtain chosen ends.
In short, Marxian economics is fundamentally and irrevocably erroneous.
Published: March 3, 2009 2:57 PM
fundamentalist
Owe Steen-Hansen: “When Hegel is talking of God in the way he does, he is perfectly aware of that he is only articulating the consequences of the kantian philosophy and the hole european metaphysics and theology, but that is not understood by unskilled interpretores who is reading Hegel without that close friendship you have to have with the european tradition…. When it comes to what Mises is saying about Marx it is the same mess. He only leaves the impression of being a very uneducated man in philosohy.”
Maybe you should learn more about Mises before you criticize him. Are you aware that he spent most of his life in Vienna until WWII, graduated from the university and spoke German? I think his understood Kant, Hegel and European tradition very well.
You claim to know Marx better than Mises did, but I have seen endless debates among Marxists over what Marx did and did not believe or understand. It seems that Marx was so full of contradictions that none of his followers can agree on what he was trying to communicate. On the other hand, Mises began his study of Marx under the one of the greatest Marxist debunkers of all time, Bohm-Bawerk. Mises wrote his first book on socialism in the 1920’s and pretty much devoted his life to understanding and correcting Marxism. Unless you can do better than your post, I’ll have to fall back on an appeal to authority and stick with Mises’ interpretation of Marx.
Published: March 3, 2009 5:05 PM
pbergn
Excellent article - a timely reminder of dangers of Marxian philosophy...
Perhaps its most dangerous aspect is that it appeals to the subconscious sense of natural justice in human mind, much like any other religion. In fact, the Marxian philosophy is built on Humanism - which is a religion without god, that is where god is replaced by the man himself...
Like any religion, the socialist ideas spread like a wildfire in the minds of the oppressed and destitute, and pose imminent and unequivocal danger to personal liberties and individualism... All the philosophies that are functionally equivalent to monotheistic religion represent danger of totalitarianism and idol worshipping. A gruesome example is the Inquisition in Middle Ages imposed by the Catholic Church on the subjects under its dominion as means of bringing the devious "unfaithful" back to the "righteous" path. Or take Stalin's gulags for that matter...
In modern age, perhaps there is nothing more dangerous than spread of Marxism (as a form of monotheistic religion-like political philosophy adopted by the state), which will ultimately result in "Chomsky's cage" solution - the enslavement of everyone else by the few "chosen" ones under the pretext of protecting humanity from itself, or as a means of "serving the common good"...
Published: March 3, 2009 11:48 PM
pbergn
TO: Owe Steen-Hansen
Owe, you seem like an intelligent and educated person judging by the scholarly post you've made on this blog...
A few comments or questions to you, though:
My understanding of Marx is that he was somewhat delusional - too obsessed with his overly materialistic world-views, and was too intense on tying the utility to the labor value. That's an obvious exaggeration to me....
Anyway, my first question to you is - is it really reasonable to believe that in the future once machines start supplanting humans more and more in doing the tedious chores, there will be only room for the unskilled labor? Doesn't logic tell us the exact opposite of that, that you would need more and more skilled labor, instead?!
My next question is - if Marx so believed in Hegelian Dialectics, why would he be so sure that the rule of proletariat would not negate itself, or create its opposite of result in some kind to struggle within itself on its spiral of progress?
Or, Marx believed that nurture (i.e. society, and NOT the nature) coupled with class affinity is wholly responsible for the personal qualities of the individual - of his or her world view. He completely disregarded any aspects of individualism - the physical nature of human beings, the uniqueness of character... Now, does that make any sense to you? Even identical twins brought up in identical social environment exhibit tangible behavioral differences. That's a fact that has been documented quite substantially...
My next question is about the fact that Marx loathed the "animal nature" of human beings, and was convinced that man "is ashamed of his animal origins"... To me, he sounds as a self-hating, human hating megalomaniac... Does he sound as "humanist" to you when he hates the very basis of human life?
And finally, what could be a possible logical interpretation of his famous slogan:
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"
Now, isn't this statement obvious absurdity?! If you give me one logical explanation to the slogan above, I will take back all my criticism.
Thank you, sir.
Published: March 4, 2009 1:04 AM
Gene Berman
Owe Steen-Hansen:
I will be a bit more blunt than the other commentors preceding me.
Almost nothing of what you write is even reasonably intelligible. That is probably due to a certain amount of unfamiliarity with English composition. Unusually, you seem to have a relatively large, well-developed (English) vocabulary in a technical sense but with some difficulty in phrasing. My guess is that the previous commentors could only get a rough idea of what you were "driving at" in most of what you wrote.
Is Deutsche your primary language? Or one in which you communicate more smoothly than in English? If so, I'd recommend that you find a copy of one of Mises' books (HUMAN ACTION recommended) in your language (which was also Mises' principal language until he was nearly 60 and in which language many of his first books were published). Or, if yours is a different language, there's a good chance that he's been translated into yours and could thus be read more intelligibly by you. If you respond as to your native language, almost anyone here would be glad to help in that regard.
Published: March 4, 2009 3:30 PM
Rob Roy
One of my friends told me that in "pure capitalism" development of nation will be very uneven. There will be pockets of extremely rich & poor areas. Which of Austrian economist deals with this matter?
Published: July 6, 2009 12:28 PM