Don’t Forget about the TALF!
Does anyone remember, during the last financial crisis, the “evil bankers” who almost collapsed the entire financial system? Then, in order to save the world, the Fed provided loans and bailouts to those same bankers?
Central Banks Are Destroying What Was Left of Free Markets
President Reagan memorably said that the nine words you don’t want to hear are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Governments in all the major jurisdictions are now making good on that unwanted promise and are taking responsibility for everything from our shoulders.
Part One
Chapter 8: A Word about Marx and Machiavelli
It is customary to describe the new Marxian immoralism, and the devious and vicious conduct of its Soviet apostles, as Machiavellian. But that is a whitewash of Marxism and a slander against Machiavelli that, even in his least elevating counsels, he little deserves. These counsels of duplicity were addressed only to a “Prince,” to whom he looked, not for ideal government in general—as to that he was a republican—but for the specific task of unifying the Italian nation in the circumstances of his time.
Part Two: Note
Note: The two following chapters, “The Word Socialism” and “Socialism and Human Nature,” were originally one essay, and were written with the thought of condensation in the Reader’s Digest. Writing for the Reader’s Digest, while not exactly an art, is a highly specialized craft. The magazine is largely concerned with the life of ideas, but as it is addressed to some fifty or sixty million readers—the actual copies printed numbering over seventeen million—the ideas have to be presented with a self-explanatory simplicity.
Chapter 9: The Word Socialism—Its Strange Adventures
The word socialism was born a hundred and eighteen years ago in an excited talk about the ideas of Robert Owen, a kindly English gentleman with shy eyes and a mighty nose and a great passion for apple dumplings. Owen came over to America in 1825 and bought a whole town and 30,000 acres of land out in Indiana on the banks of the Wabash. He issued a sweeping invitation to the “industrious and well disposed of all nations” to come out there and join him in the ownership of this property, and start living in cooperative peace and loving-kindness as nature had intended man to live.
Chapter 10: Socialism and Human Nature
Why did the benign dream of Fourier and Owen, when made plausible by the rationalizations of Marx, and dynamic by the engineering genius of Lenin, turn into a nightmare? I think the reason, if you go to the depth of it, is single and very simple. It is because these men and all their tens of millions of followers, notwithstanding their bold scorn of superstition and firm determination to be realistic, had a naive and romantic conception of what a man is.
Chapter 11: Don’t Kill the Goose
An address to the Annual Convention of the American Federal of Labor, Cincinnati, Ohio, November 18, 1948
Recommended for Further Reading
The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek
Socialism by Ludwig von Mises
The Social Crisis of Our Time by Wilhelm Roepke
Capitalism and the Historians by F.A. Hayek, T.A. Ashton, Louis M. Hacker, Bertrand de Jouvenel, W.H. Hutt
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Collectivism, A False Utopia by William Henry Chamberlin
Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons
Lost Illusion by Freda Utley
Stalin by Boris Souvarine
Witness by Whittaker Chambers
How Government Intervention Triggers Depressions
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.
Although painful, the solution to the 2020 economic recession is simple—uncover our problems, let prices adjust, and reallocate capital toward productive usages. The quicker we adjust, the shorter the recession and the sooner we create a sustainable economic foundation for future prosperity. This approach is the polar opposite to the current interventionist and inflationist orthodoxy.
