High School Curriculum Editing - Help Me School distance learners in the Austrian Perspective?

[John_James]

@wmcompanyman

First, the lessons I am editing assert, boldly, that the dominant philosophy of the so-called Gilded Age was not laissez-faire, but “social Darwinism.” The effect is to make students believe that everything from market competition to factory conditions were a semi-deliberate attempt to weed out the weak. Obviously this is idiotic, but where can I find a corrective to this? Who can I read in order to be able to offer, succinctly, an alternate viewpoint? Has an Austrian dealt with both the truth and the smear aspect of classical liberalism as social darwinism?

Milton Friedman was quite fond of pointing out the fact that the 19th century was the period of “the greatest outpouring of eleemosynary and charitable activity the world has ever known.”

John Stossel (with David Boaz of the Cato Institute and Jeffrey Miron of Harvard) cover this here as well. Boaz specifically mentions the fact that voluntary welfare organizations sprung up all over the place, and people took care of each other…they didn’t sit around and expect “the government” to do it. Some sources on this:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u7h412q66342p8x0/

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-6443.00181/abstract

Mises scholar Jeff Riggenbach has said:

…there is considerable evidence that the entire concept of “social Darwinism” as we know it today was virtually invented by Richard Hofstadter. Eric Foner, in an introduction to a then-new edition of Hofstadter’s book published in the early 1990s, declines to go quite that far. “Hofstadter did not invent the term Social Darwinism,” Foner writes, “which originated in Europe in the 1860s and crossed the Atlantic in the early twentieth century. But before he wrote, it was used only on rare occasions; he made it a standard shorthand for a complex of late-nineteenth-century ideas, a familiar part of the lexicon of social thought.”

Definitely look into the history of the term…

Also, go to mises.org main page and do a search for “social darwin”, and another for “charity history” and “19th century charity”. You’ll see things like this:

"Is the Starving Man Free?"

"Why Don’t People Get It?"

Second, these lessons blithely assert that the Fed and inflation are necessary because, before the Fed, there was “not enough money.” According to this course, when we had sound money people such as farmers and small businessmen had to both pay dear to borrow the money and - because of deflation - had to pay back staggering sums as the money they owed had not only accrued interest but also increased in value.

“Should the Quantity of Money Be Increased?”

Hoppe:

“Once a money is established, any stock of money becomes compatible with any amount of employment and real income. There is never any need for more money since any amount will perform the same maximum extent of needed money work: that is, to provide a general medium of exchange and a means of economic calculation by entrepreneurs.” (“The Misesian Case Against Keynes”) (also you might check out Gold as Money: FAQ)

This may be too technical, but Mises obviously goes into this in The Theory of Money and Credit…at this part he explains how expanding the money supply only hurts the economy.