If there is anything to be said for the difficult times in which we live, it is that they are a reminder that our mission is far from complete. The forces of destructionism are always waiting for an opportunity to rob us of the blessings of civilization. Mises believed that the best way to defeat them was to say what is true. Against the idea of liberty, he said, the fiercest sword of the despot is finally powerless.
Charles Lindblom is at it again. In God and Man at Yale, William Buckley, Jr.’s indictment of leftist teaching at Yale University written half a century ago,
Normally, the pool of suckers is limited to people who are at least somewhat ignorant of the capitalist system, and therefore don't know what is reasonably possible in terms of investment returns. Suckers tend to think that profits are based on theft and exploitation, instead of on hard-work and entrepreneurship, and they want a piece of the action.
The Nobel Committee has selected Vernon Smith for its economics prize. Smith was strongly influenced by Ludwig von Mises' treatise, Human Action, and for that Austrians can be grateful. Furthermore, Smith's research has demonstrated time and again that the Austrians are correct regarding human action in the marketplace and the mainstreamers are flat out wrong.
War is coming, we're still in recession, the public is still angry about 9-11 (hey, is all this connected?), so we must do something to rekindle a sense of joy in our own private lives. But what? What people on the home front have always done: throw themselves into the domestic arts, preferably something that is beyond the time and connects us with ancient truth. For my part, it is all about bread.
The answers we receive from the academics in response to the collapse of the Enron Corporation and the implosion of other firms are not answers at all. At best, they deal only with effects, or, at worst, reverse the pattern of cause and effect. To put it another way, writes William Anderson, the people who are supposed to know the answers don’t even know what questions they should pursue.
Many intellectuals believe that war is good for many things, including fixing up a weak economy, writes Adam Young. The coming invasion and occupation of Iraq will happen because the Bush administration believes in the Keynesian/Great Depression myth of perpetual war for perpetual prosperity.
It is hard to understand the vague and ill-defined laws Martha Stewart and Sam Waksal are accused of violating. But the premise of the law is not hard to divine: Competition in capital markets must proceed from a level playing field. All investors are entitled to the same information advantage irrespective of effort and abilities. In a word, socialism!
Those who have written in favor of distributism on moral grounds appear to revel in their ignorance of economics--as if a discipline devoted to the application of human reason to the problems of scarcity in the world could actually in itself be antagonistic to ethics and faith.
