[Editorial Note: Price inflation now having reared its head in many sectors, despite constant downward pressure on prices from innovation and imports, and the business cycle continuing to plague the world economy, it is time to revisit a neglected classic from Murray Rothbard, an excerpt from a long study that first appeared in The Gold Standard: Perspectives in the Austrian School (Mises Institute, 1992).]
At our conferences and programs, the students who attend are the first to have been educated in the age of information. Nearly all the students now attending were born on or after the year of our founding (1982). The Mises Institute went online in 1995, about the time that web browsers were becoming more common and a new world of communication opened up to us and to the world. The average student we serve was a young teenager.
[The following is excerpted from The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, a socio-psychological study of anti-market bias published by D. Van Nostrand (Princeton, N.J., 1956). It has been made available online by special arrangement with the Libertarian Press.]
With the recent rate hike, the mainstream press obediently parrots the macroeconomic analysis offered by our friendly central planners at the Federal Reserve. The average citizen knows that he or she is not nearly smart enough to understand the complex interrelationships of various price indices, yield curves, consumer confidence, and so forth—that’s Greenspan’s job.
In a growing economy with sound money, the purchasing power of your money should and would be always on the rise. Your dollar would buy more this year than last year, not only in terms of quality improvements but also in terms of price. This is another way of saying that prices would constantly fall for most goods and services just as they have for goods offered by the technology sector.
Colleges offer their students a taste of reality by simulating the political atmosphere of society with the presence of student government associations (SGAs). The election process succeeds in mimicking many aspects of real political campaigns: the cutthroat environment of campaign promises combined with the relentless schmoozing of constituencies, and mindless pride.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal is a perfect example of how bad economic arguments in support of good ends can be easily twisted and used to confuse the general public (Gwendolyn Bounds, “Argument for minimum-wage boost,” 7/27/04, p. B3). When we engage in poor reasoning and faulty economic logic in support of a noble cause, we can end up doing much more harm than good in the pursuit of liberty and economic freedom.
In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises wrote that labor unions have always been the primary source of anticapitalistic propaganda. I was reminded of this recently when I saw a bumper sticker proclaiming one of the bedrock tenets of unionism: “The Union Movement: The People Who Brought You the Weekend.”
Last year, the governor of Alabama proposed and then overwhelmingly lost a bitter referendum to increase taxes and boost revenue. Voters rightly saw the campaign as a slick attempt to expand the public sector’s power, prestige, and wealth transfers by increasing the degree of legal plunder in Alabama’s tax system.
