Comment on the Mises Institute Facebook Page

Miscellaneous General
1

A fan, asking for help in a debate, posted this on the Mises Institute Facebook page:

Debate rebuttal assistance please: I’m new to Mises and was presented with this during a debate:

And as far as von Mises’s hair-brained psuedo-economics go, they tried that in Chile under Pinochet, we saw how that worked out. Economic freedom for a lucky few at the expense of everyone else imposed at the barrel of a gun. According to various reports and investigations 1,200–3,200 people were killed, up to 80,000 were interned, and up to 30,000 were tortured by his regime including women and children. Some freedom there.

It’s not coincidental that von Mises praised Fascism as the salvation of Europe (his only criticism being that it didn’t go far enough), that Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell supported the discredited idea of so-called scientific racism and supported the political campaigns of neo-Nazi and Klansman David Duke, that von Hayek advised the Pinochet regime and advocated to Margaret Thatcher that she follow his model (she wisely rejected the idea) or that José Piñera, Pinochet’s minister of mining and labor is a senior fellow at the Koch brother owned Cato Institute. American Libertarianism and Anarcho-capitalism are nothing more than the same ideology repackaged in a thin wrapper of liberty and freedom rhetoric to be marketed the tragically naive.

I posted my response:

Has this person ever read Mises? Could he tell you about his regression theorem? Praxeology? Economic calculation? He doesn’t provide any criticisms of Mises’s “hair-brained pseudo-economics” at all. First off, they did not try Misesian economics in Chile under Pinochet, it was mostly Friedmanite (Chicago school) economics. Any Austrian influence came from Hayek. Secondly, he doesn’t even criticize Friedmanite economics! His whole argument is that the economics are wrong because Pinochet was a dictator. That’s like me saying socialism is wrong because Stalin was a dictator. No, socialism is wrong because it can’t calculate, the labor theory of value is invalid, etc. Obviously when you have a dictator there’s going to be murder by the state;that’s the point,it’s a dictator!

Next, Mises did not praise fascism. That quote has been taken way out of context. In the previous paragraphs he was criticizing fascism, and in the next sentence he basically said it was stupid and people shouldn’t get too excited about it. I haven’t heard anything about the Rothbard-Rockwell stuff, though I doubt it’s true. As far as I can tell, he is correct on the Hayek stuff, although Hayek’s strength was in economics, not in ethics or political science; he was probably the only Austrian who could be considered a “neoliberal”. I also don’t know anything about Jose Pinera, but I think I should point out that most Misesians/Rothbardians want nothing to do with the beltway Kochs and Cato Institute.

I’m sure I got some stuff wrong.

Anyways, I’m sure you’ve all heard these criticisms before, but I still thought it would be interesting for discussion and to hear your responses.

2

Mises was a Jew who was persecuted under fascism. Yeah, I’ll bet he loved it alright.

3

I know,right? And Rothbard, also a Jew, was an evil neo-nazi who praised Hitler.

4

It is pretty obvious that this person is trying their hardest to associate Mises et al with any bad word they can find.

Your response was pretty good and similar to what I would’ve written, but the people running the Facebook page should simply delete such troll comments. Not because they should be afraid of “the truth”, but because the buzzword-slinger will always get more attention than the reasonable guy, and LvMI shouldn’t lend its Facebook page to such purposes.

5

This is nothing more than an exercise in propaganda. Next this person will say Mises worshipped Hitler and Rothbard dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Also, the Koch brothers have done a lot of good for the liberty movement. It was Charles Koch who paid Rothbard an entire year’s salary to do nothing else but write the Ethics of Liberty.

6

That is true, the Kochs are a lot better than leftists will admit; however, they aren’t perfect or consistent.

Sort of like Rockefeller. Standard Oil was pretty great, but he was involved (or his heirs were) in the Fed, the progressive era, etc.

7

I find it interesting that dumb liberals and dumb neoconservatives called Ron Paul an anti-semite for not worshipping Israel when all of his ideas are based off of ideas that came from Jews, i.e. Rothbard, Mises, Rand, Kirzner, Block, Machlup, etc.

8

It’s pretty sad that when you google “Lew Rockwell” the second suggestion is “Lew Rockwell Racist”.

9

All you have to do is shout “racist” in response to any argument and that argument is automatically shut down.

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Funny thing is that the progressive movement was born in racism. Woodrow Wilson, widely considered to be the big progressive, found The Birth of a Nation to be his favorite movie ever. This is opposed to a small-government libertarian conservative like Calvin Coolidge who was the first President to have black people in positions of power.

12

Source on the Calvin Coolidge claim? That’s a fun fact.

13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge#Civil_rights

14

Yeah, they’re obviously hurling falsities at Austrians, but they’re currently just making stuff up. How easy do you think it would be for them to build a convincing, though still false, case based on actual evidence?

Some prominent Mises people (Robert Murphy, Stephan Kinsella, and Jeffrey Tucker) along with lots of other people who are out there advocating Austrian ideas currently associate with and highly praise the thinking of a man who wrote the following without retracting it:

The idea, you see, is that Christians and so on might be collectivistic and everything, but it took the Jews (you know, the people with the catchphrase “the only good Nazi is a compliant Nazi!”) to ruin a profession millions of people turn to for help.

You too can help the cause of individualism by talking in terms of group stereotypes with full seriousness! In case you think he’s just speaking in general themes rather than about every individual in a collective, he also said:

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Who wrote that?

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Was it Lew Rockwell?

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I got those quotes from a discussion entitled “Rothbard on Children (not for the squeamish)” and from the blog post “Are People Just Stupid?”, which is worth reading as a whole for all the additional wonders therein, including the comment left.

18

I remember saying things when I was younger that I would not have said today. I once said that I would vote for Bill Clinton if I was able to and I have never retracted that statement. However, my mind has changed. Perhaps I should go on Facebook and announce that fact.

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Why is Molyneux’s “stereotype” incorrect?

The major psychologists at the turn of the 19th century were almost exclusively Jews. To this day ‘dissension and disobedience to authority’ are considered disorders in the DSM. Let’s not belabor this though. Consider that the treatment of Israeli dissentors on the issue of Palestine. (Just google ‘israel dissent.’) Maybe they’ll send the police your house while you get castigated by your local Rabbi or whatever. Why is it this colassal irony is playing out today? Open your eyes, goyim.

Your attitude is designed to shut down discussion of the issue- it does not make into a clear thinker or a moral person, it just means you were well trained in school to react negatively to any criticism directed toward non-whites. In other words, a perfectly healthy specimine.

20

I’d propose that the question is whether the correction will avoid significant problems. Mr. Molyneux has quite a collection of statements that cause trouble for people. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch for this to cause trouble if nonlibertarians hear of him, which is something he tries to make happen, and decided to dig a bit into the interesting-sounding philosophy of the man.

You may be totally correct, but I can’t see it yet from your argument for a few reasons.

The primary thing is that that mindset is hardly limited to the Jews. This may be a valid stereotype but of humans in general, which would make singling out the Jews misleading. It’s possible that the reason that dissent was so readily equated with mental illness was because the vast majority, independent of whether Jewish, already thought that ahead of time. The fact that so many of the early psychologists were Jewish might be a mere accident, and it also stands to reason that you might have gotten the same sort of theories from anyone.

The other big issue is that you’re pointing to Israelis, who live in a relatively dangerous country, rather than Jews in general. It may be that that is another example of danger inspiring people to attack those who don’t adhere to the group. It may be something else. Saying that it’s because they’re Jews and that this applies, throughout the world, to Jews more than other collectives are two things you’ve not yet established.

A smaller issue about Mr. Molyneux’s argument is that it focuses on psychology when the claim is about their attitudes in general. Similarly, yours focuses on the current DSM, which came far later than the opening of last century, and on dissenters on one particular issue in one country. If the clear evidence ends up to consist only of what happened in a few rather small areas, it would indicate that it is a fluke rather than a general trend. In such a situation, a focus on the few areas where the trend looks best will be convincing and misleading.

To be clear about it, these are all merely hypotheticals that are possible. I don’t necessarily hold to any of them. They just show that your argument doesn’t address a lot of very possible situations, and so it’s not yet a conclusive argument.

As far as my attitude, I don’t think that I have that attitude.