Economic Ideology Intellectual Bloodbath: Carl Menger and his evolutionary ‘Austrian School’ vs. Marxists-Socialists, Keynesians, Ayn Rand and her ‘Objectivism’, Chicago School, Rothbardians, and everyone else.
[This article is an early draft]
What is the correct or best “Economic Ideology” is arguably one of, if not THE most important question to answer. Much of the 20th century was wrecked by misguided socialist economic ideology leading to the Soviet Union, Mao’s Communist China, as well as Nazi (National Socialist) Germany. How can so many “experts” and well-intentioned ideologues make numerous monumental errors? Per title, in this essay we will make the case that Carl Menger and his so-called ‘Austrian School of Economics’ provided the correct answers and also explain what led others to fall for erroneous ideologies and inadvertent disastrous ramifications like the current chaos in Gaza.
Carl Menger and his ‘Austrian School of Economics’ showed us how Homo sapiens is essentially living in a movie-like Matrix, or as the great 19th century British philosopher who Darwin once referred to as ‘twenty times my superior’, Herbert Spencer, cleverly referred to as ‘The Social Organism’. This matrix-organism and the “systems” that enable it like language, governments, law, economic competition, and money are similar to what the respiratory, nervous, digestive, etc. systems are to cells in a multicellular organism. “Systems” that enable higher levels of order and cooperation and were NOT designed by the cells or people, but by an evolutionary process largely independent of their (cells or man) design or reason.
Menger writes:
“Language, religion, law, even the state itself, and, to mention a few economic social phenomena, the phenomena of markets, of competition, of money, and numerous other social structures are already met with in epochs of history where we cannot properly speak of a purposeful activity of the community as such directed at establishing them.”
Just like via an evolutionary process we can easily hypothesize about the emergence and workings of the biological order, Menger rightly felt like the social order should also be studied in an evolutionary manner. He writes:
“Now if state, society, economy, etc., are conceived of as organisms, or as structures analogous to them, the notion of following directions of research in the realm of social phenomena similar to those followed in the realm of organic nature readily suggests itself.”
Thus Menger’s intellectual descendent, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek summarizes:
“We understand now that all enduring structures above the level of the simplest atoms, and up to the brain and society, are the results of, and can be explained only in terms of, processes of selective evolution.”
Without Menger and Spencer’s evolutionary insights we naively focus on the actions of individuals while overlooking the far more important evolutionary factors which are ultimately responsible for the ideas and complex circumstances which get them to act, as Spencer tells us regarding how we see the social order and naively focus on the individuals overlooking the more important evolutionary factors. He writes:
”This vast social organization, the life of which we severally aid and which makes our lives possible by satisfying our wants, is just as much a naturally-developed product as is the language by which the wants are communicated. No State-authority, no king or council, made the one any more than the other. The ridiculous Carlylean theory of the Great Man and his achievements, absolutely ignores this genesis of social structures and functions which has been going on through the ages. The deeds of the ruler who modifies the actions of his generation, it confounds with the evolution of the great body-politic itself, of which those actions are but incidents. It is as though a child, seeing for the first time a tree from which a gardener is here cutting off a branch and there pruning away smaller parts, should regard the gardener, the only visible agent, as the creator of the whole structure: knowing nothing about the agency of sun and rain, air and soil. Undeveloped intelligences cannot recognize the results of slow, silent, invisible causes.”
When a lion takes over a pride and kills the cubs so that the females will once again be ready to mate, we don’t say that the lion is “evil”, we rightly understand the complex evolutionary factors leading to such actions. It is likewise important to look at our socioeconomic disasters using an evolutionary lens that is free of “blame” and full of sympathy and understanding as Menger’s evolutionary framework provides. As Mises tells us:
“Neither as judges allotting praise and blame nor as avengers seeking out the guilty should we face the past. We seek truth, not guilt; we want to know how things came about to understand them, not to issue condemnations.”
Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Churchill, Roosevelt, Fauci, etc. were not “evil”, which is itself a mythical linguistic construct inherited from more religious times, they were fellow homo sapiens adored by their respective masses who absorbed horrendous ideas, or better said, myths, propagated by scholars arising from the complexity of the economy as in the case of Socialism (Hitler-Lenin-Mao-Roosevelt-etc.), and the biochemical order as in the case of CovidMania and resulting coercive lockdowns and damaging vaccinations and more (Fauci). As Hayek tells us:
”It is necessary to realize that the sources of many of the most harmful agents in this world are often not evil men but high-minded idealists, and that in particular the foundations of totalitarian barbarism have been laid by honourable and well-meaning scholars who never recognized the offspring they produced.”
Hayek again:
”Most people are still unwilling to face the most alarming lesson of modern history: that the greatest crimes of our time have been committed by governments that had the enthusiastic support of millions of people who were guided by moral impulses. It is simply not true that Hitler or Mussolini, Lenin or Stalin, appealed only to the worst instincts of their people: they also appealed to some of the feelings which also dominate contemporary democracies.”
So, very briefly, the wisdom of Menger and his Austrians in 15 minutes:
“Processes of selective evolution” or ‘natural selection’ in general can be said to have created two mechanisms for creating two types of orders-”enduring structures”, biological and social. The biological order is created via the well-known mechanism of ‘biological evolution’ with genes being like the sentences which store the information necessary to create-coordinate life-order. Mutations cause new genes and thus new information to arise which leads to a different life-form which is then ‘naturally selected’ as it inadvertently competes with others, with the winner reproducing more and thus passing on more copies of the better-adapted-”fitter” genes-information-design to future generations.
The information that coordinates the social order emerges and spreads via economic competition which itself emerges from the tradition of private property.
Free people are motivated to discover the best information with which to increase the rate at which they transform or reorder the matter they exclusively control (their private property) to create wealth. Most of us transform our bodies in a manner that maximizes the value of the wealth in terms of labor, services, or products we produce and then trade with companies (employers) or the public. From our freedom to use or transform our ‘private property’ emerges the ‘freedom to trade’ it with anyone in the entire planet which inadvertently transforms mankind into a global supercomputer where companies are motivated to innovate and learn-copy from each other(competitors) thus inadvertently cooperate to create and spread superior information and subsequent social order throughout the world. For example, perhaps a Honda engineer in Tokyo, Japan invented power door locks, and thanks to the ‘economic competition’ which emerges from people’s freedom to only trade their wealth for what they calculate to be best, BMW, Ford, Toyota and other competitors had to also copy the power door locks idea and thus inadvertently spread superior information and subsequent order throughout the world. It is our freedom as consumers to trade our life-and-order-sustaining wealth for what we calculate to be best, and if we have superior information as producers to go into business, which motivates existing businesses(competitors) to innovate-compete-copy-learn. Just like in the Olympics we can discover the best athletes in the world due to global competition, so does having the ‘freedom to trade’ with everyone in the world allows the best ideas to compete and spread globally thus ensuring the best possible global order. Via advertising, competitors are motivated to spread the potential usefulness and superiority of their products-ideas as well as the defects-inferiority of their competitors thus accelerating the need to compete-copy-spread superior information and subsequent order. As cost-cutting ideas emerge and inevitably spread via competition leading relative prices to continuously fall, new profitable ideas easily arise and once again spread via competition in an endless cycle of knowledge generation-innovation. For example, computers were once very expensive, but once the price of making them came down enough, people easily realized that every home could have them, which gave birth to our computerized world and the Internet and all the great things that flow from it. The more wealth is produced, the more wealth must be offered in exchange for labor as companies compete against each other for the labor they need which helps explain why the economic pie grows for everyone. Morals are ways of acting; they too are knowledge which also emerges and spreads via economic competition to considerable degrees. It is hard-working, tolerant, courteous people, who thanks to competition, inevitably motivate everyone else to be likewise. As Hayek writes:
“Competition is, after all, always a process in which a small number makes it necessary for larger numbers to do what they do not like, be it to work harder, to change habits, or to devote a degree of attention, continuous application, or regularity to their work which without competition would not be needed.”
As millions of Italians, Britons, Germans, Jews and others from all over the world came to America, it was ultimately the competition which grows from ‘private property’ and thus individual liberty which stripped these people of their otherwise nationalistic, ethnocentric, tribalistic “identities” and evolved what came to be seen as the classic American character of wanting to be seen as a reputable and honest businessman or professional who treats everyone with respect and wears a business suit as opposed to older ethnocentric attires. Thus freedom and emerging “competitive knowledge discovery”, as opposed to leading to chaos, is what 1) enables and motivates the discovery and spread of superior information and subsequent social order, 2) civilizes us, 3) protects us from being coerced into doing something we don’t want and thus allows us to live our lives as we wish, 4) and is vital for discovering the truth. Freedom is the ultimate algorithm!
The production of wealth requires the consumption of existing wealth, and money-creation by governments via their central banks obviously does NOT create such wealth. For example, if 1,000 men are to produce a skyscraper, they must consume or use real existing wealth like food, materials, energy, etc. in order to produce it. Government money-creation just allows the government-connected entities that get the newly-created money to consume wealth while leaving the rest of society with less wealth and more money per unit of existing wealth and thus higher prices which eventually cause the original profit-loss calculations of many businessmen to no longer be profitable leading to economic downturns-‘busts’. Due to the higher prices, people’s savings and wages will buy them less wealth. How much less? An amount similar to that which the receivers of the government-created money were able to consume. For example, during CovidMania lockdowns, just from March to May 2020, the US government created over 3 trillion dollars so that many people could stay home and consume without working-producing leading to prices rising(+20% in real estate and meat, +40% in gasoline…). A gold standard prevents clueless politicians-technocrats from acquiring wealth by just creating the money to trade for it. It forces them to tax the gold directly from citizens thus preventing unlimited taxation and government growth or acquisition of private wealth which is enabled by money-creation.
The role of governments and thus coercion should be minimized because governmental or ‘public sector’ bureaucracies, being coercive monopolies which get their life or order-sustaining wealth through taxes and compulsion are immune to the competitive-information-spreading incentives which motivate private sector entities to keep up with the competition in terms of information and hustle. Government plans can’t work if people are free to not go along with or fund them, so they inevitably require compulsion. The former Soviet Union had plenty of highly educated scientists and ‘experts’ whose plans required the coercion of millions as still happens in Cuba, but they were thoroughly crushed by free Americans and their ‘competitive knowledge discovery’. The “classic” night-time image below helps explain the difference between competitive-private-free orders and monopolistic-government-coerced orders. Keep your eye on how information arises and spreads via competition and continuously restructures the social order.
Government regulations are coercive competitionless monopoly information which is not subject to continuous improvement and replacement via competition so they paralyze entire industries slowing down ‘competitive knowledge discovery’, driving up costs (more lawyers-regulators-bureaucrats), and potentially making criminals out of people who harm nobody but just prefer to do things differently. Compare the increasingly regulated-paralyzed healthcare sector which has grown from consuming less than 5% of the economic pie in 1960 to over 20% today, to the free-competitive IT sector where even the poorest of Americans can afford rapidly improving amazing cell phones and technology. In the graph below one can see how the more regulated and thus competition immune a sector is (Hospital Services) the more expensive it becomes.
Let us now briefly discuss how the above mechanism of ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ and emerging ‘Social Organism’, as with language, arose inadvertently without man’s design via a relatively blind process of ‘cultural evolution’ via ‘group selection’. Essentially 20,000 years ago there was a sort of petri dish of groups of people and their respective cultures-softwares, and ‘natural selection’-competition selected those cultures or groups whose sort of ‘cultural mutations’ led to a more productive-fitter-powerful social order, with respect for private property and thus individual freedom and emerging business culture ultimately being the most important tradition given the ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ that inadvertently emerged from it. Consider the following example, omnipresence, the ability to be everywhere at all times is another concept that would provide a great benefit to religions that used it to describe their God. Without God’s omnipresence you could get away with breaking the rules that give society order and only have to face the consequences brought upon by fellow men. But if God is everywhere, watching your every move, you will be much more likely to follow those rules that give your society a productive social order. A similar case can be made for the concepts of “sin” and “evil”. Did clever men “conspire” to create our religions to control us? Of course not. It could be said that an omnipresent God is one of those culturally evolved-designed concepts that is far more important than anything our “reason” has ever invented, as Hayek writes:
”…we may owe to these religions the preservation — admittedly for false reasons — of practices that were more important in enabling man to survive in large numbers than most of what has been accomplished through reason.”
A great example of this evolutionary process was the ‘Protestant Reformation’. For centuries the Catholic Church’s traditions held immense coercive-monopoly-competitionless power which prevented or retarded individual freedom and emerging ‘competitive knowledge discovery’. In the early 1500s, among other religious reinterpretations, Martin Luther preached that indulgences (payments to the Catholic Church to help one go to heaven) were unnecessary, that a person could go to heaven by believing in Christ without the Catholic Church’s approval, and that the Bible itself, not the Church’s edicts-interpretations was what mattered. This helped reduce the coercive-monopoly power of the Catholic Church and spark a pro-freedom and thus emergent ‘competitive knowledge discovery’. Instead of people thinking and producing for the never-changing Priesthood, people now gained the freedom to think and produce for each other, leading to ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ and skyrocketing rates of innovation-production-prosperity in Europe-Christendom. Now, very important! Did Martin Luther “reason” that his religious reinterpretations would accelerate ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ leading to global Capitalism and Homo Sapiens’ recent sky-rocketing prosperity? Of course not! Just like solitary cells millions of years ago inadvertently via an evolutionary process created the respiratory-circulatory-nervous-etc. “systems” that led to multicellular organisms without ‘designing them’, so is the free-market and Capitalism, to borrow the insightful phrase from Adam Ferguson, “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”, or as Carl Menger writes, it arose “as the unintended product of historical development”. Hayek elaborates:
“We have never designed our economic system. We were not intelligent enough for that. We have stumbled into it and it has carried us to unforeseen heights and given rise to ambitions which may yet lead us to destroy it.”
By the late 1800s, the bewildering complexity of modern cities coupled with, per above, man not understanding how the ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ that creates civilization “emerges” from “private property” and thus personal liberty since this amazing mechanism had been designed, not by clever men, but by an evolutionary process we didn’t even really understand at the time, people understandably fell for all the usual anti-Capitalist, pro-Socialist-Nationalist central planning fallacies which still dominate popular thinking to this day. Freedom was increasingly seen as leading to chaos and ‘social injustice’ while competition immune government coercion by “experts” was seen as a superior alternative. The environment was ripe for the emergence of a new mythology, Socialism-Communism-Statism-Scientism. Eventually some smarter ape would describe these fallacies-myths in a manner that was bound to go viral and that is what happened with Karl Marx and his bite-sized ‘Communist Manifesto’ where Marx writes:
“the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property”… “Abolition of the family!”
Via Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution in Russia (1918) and other ‘Great Leaders’ throughout the world (Mao-China, Castro-Cuba, Pol Pot-Cambodia, FDR-USA, Hitler-Germany), many created massive central-planning-coercive bureaucracies that destroyed or hampered ‘competitive knowledge discovery’ and thus their own socioeconomic order that was sustained by it. Hayek summarizes the rise-fall of Communist mythology:
“Among the founders of religions over the last two thousand years, many opposed property and the family. But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family(and also anti-religion), is not promising. For it is, I believe, itself a religion which had its time, and which is now declining rapidly. In communist and socialist countries we are watching how the natural selection of religious beliefs disposes of the maladapted.”
Having spent most of our evolutionary history as tribal apes, we have simply not evolved to intuitively understand the recently emerged evolutionary forces that create the social order, the vital need for freedom and privatization, and the immense harm that too much government can do. Tribal warfare, political infighting, coercing each other, rape, and ‘The law of the jungle’, are things we have been doing for millions of years and are somewhat intuitive, commercial society and understanding the aforementioned economic concepts which have been around for less than a few thousand is not. Hayek summarizes:
“…man’s instincts…were not made for the kinds of surroundings, and for the numbers, in which he now lives. They were adapted to life in the small roving bands or troops in which the human race and its immediate ancestors evolved during the few million years while the biological constitution of homo sapiens was being formed.”
The Dodo bird quickly went extinct because it had not evolved to recognize humans as potential dangers, we similarly just line up for ‘central planning’ and government coordinated self-destruction over and over. Notice how the biggest companies or ‘private sector orders’ in the world like Amazon, Apple, Walmart, Google and Microsoft, which hire and efficiently coordinate the actions of millions of fellow homo sapiens across the world regardless of age, sex, religion or race, do not force anyone to buy their products or coerce anyone in any way and have no army or tribalistic and patriotic flag salutations. They spend all of their time peacefully innovating and copying each other’s innovations thus inadvertently spreading superior information and subsequent social order. Yet the human dodos hate the free private sector and love their coercive ‘central planners’, “great leaders”, and coercive monopolistic governmental structures which make it more difficult to overcome inferior ideas, popular myths, and also reinforces some tribal ‘Identity’ (Jews, Russians, Chinese, Americans, Cubans, etc.) from which inevitably an ‘us vs. them’ mentality emerges.
The above insights are the key to understanding how with have this technologically advanced complex world, with mindbogglingly complex airplanes, microchips, the Internet and so on, yet remain so economically ignorant and tribalistic, with the planet littered with nuclear weapons and “experts” and the masses believing we need them, and a nearly senile Joe Biden as President of the United States. If “reason” really played the significant role most of us assume, none of the latter three would be happening. The fact that today hardly anyone in the world really understands the vital link between private property and thus freedom and civilization is further proof of how the entire social order is the result, not of our reason, but of an evolutionary process. As Hayek writes with respect to private property:
”…I am quite convinced nobody invented it for a known purpose, and to me the proof of this is that even now hardly anybody yet understands what the advantages of private property and the market society are.”
How much wealth had to be consumed in order to produce a gallon of gasoline that sells in Seattle for $4.50? Or a pound of beef that sells in London for $5.35? We can’t know for sure, however, we can be fairly certain that it was less than the advertised price which on average must include the costs. The price of any item in the world lets us know that there is an order at that particular place and time that is coordinated by information that can produce the item while consuming less than the advertised price. THAT IS AMAZING! This allow goods to be purchased and combined in a manner that ensures that the combination (like a car) can easily have a price set that properly accounts for the costs-consumption of the whole (car) by just adding the prices of the parts used to produce it (wheels, glass, robotics, labor, etc.), parts which themselves had a price set that included their costs-consumption and so on, each part-input managed-ordered by entrepreneurs-brains-CPUs with highly specialized time-and-place specific information who are always using profit-loss calculation to ensure they are increasing the economic pie. The concept-tradition of ‘private property’ plays a vital role here as well, it is not until matter-things are privately owned, that they are controlled-coordinated by brains-CPUs that are incentivized to discover the best information with which to reorder-coordinate them in the most productive-profitable way possible.
Let us devote one more paragraph to help show the impossibility of Socialist-Communist Soviet-style central planning. A restaurant in Miami sells a burger for $8. The $8 price provides vital information. Perhaps $1, might be profit, and $7 will be spent in costs, in other words, in the necessary consumption or use of the existing wealth needed to produce the burger, things like equipment, labor and everything employees will consume at home (food, energy) thanks to their paychecks that came from the $7-burger. The businessman discovered 1) that there are enough customers nearby willing to patronize the restaurant at the $8-burger price and he also discovered 2) how to reorder $7 worth of stuff(labor-supplies-etc.) to produce the burger. If he sets prices too high, customers will choose other superior competing options, if too low, they might not cover costs and cause the business to consume more than it produces leading to an overall shrinking of the economic pie and thus go out of business. Socialism-Communism can’t work because only businessmen dispersed throughout society are at the right time and place needed to discover people’s desires(1) and (2) the information needed to properly set prices and thus coordinate an order that produces more than it consumes and is thus self-sustaining, profitable, alive. In other words, central planners are NOT at the right time and place with the right incentives needed to acquire the necessary information needed to coordinate the movement of matter in a manner where more wealth is produced than consumed, so they inevitably just shrink the economic pie leading to eventual famine, chaos, as the history of socialism always shows.
Imagine if suddenly each cell in your body was as intelligent as a human and even absorbed a PhD. in biochemistry. If it used its newfound power of reason and knowledge and acted counter to what it had been doing unconsciously for millions of years it would immediately lead to chaos and the death-disorder of whatever complex multicellular organism it was a part of. This is essentially what happened to homo sapiens as cultural evolution gave us more freedom, yet the “reason” of the politicians, “experts” and tribal masses kept pushing us towards order-destroying central planning.
Keynesian economics is just similar central planning fallacies and incentives, but instead of the smarter apes fooling themselves into attempting to centrally plan via edicts, they increasingly did so by acquiring the necessary wealth via money-creation. There is NOTHING of real intellectual value or insight in Marxism-Socialism-Communism or Keynesian economics. You can’t centrally plan (no Socialism), and the creation of wealth requires the consumption, use, or transformation of EXISTING-SAVED-UNCONSUMED wealth (not money creation) thus Keynesian economics is obviously bullshit. Henry Hazlitt properly summarizes Keynesian economics in a few sentences when he tells us, “John Maynard Keynes was, basically, an inflationist.”…“In other words, the Keynesian solution to every slow-down in business or rise in unemployment was still another dose of inflation.”
Marxism, Socialism, and Keynesian economics are popular myths for the same reason that religious priesthoods exist, they just appeal to the existing biases-views and ‘incentive structures’ of large groups of people.
Let us now discuss various free-market intellectuals and ‘the evolution of the great body-politic itself’ which they sort of represent. But let us first quote-learn from Mises. In a vital section of his treatise Human Action titled ‘The Fight Against Error’ Mises writes:
“Logic is for man the only means to master the problems of reality. What is contradictory in theory, is no less contradictory in reality. No ideological inconsistency can provide a satisfactory, i.e., working, solution for the problems offered by the facts of the world. The only effect of contradictory ideologies is to conceal the real problems and thus to prevent people from finding in time an appropriate policy for solving them. Inconsistent ideologies may sometimes postpone the emergence of a manifest conflict. But they certainly aggravate the evils which they mask and render a final solution more difficult. They multiply the agonies, they intensify the hatreds, and make peaceful settlement impossible. It is a serious blunder to consider ideological contradictions harmless or even beneficial.”
In other words, we have to do the best that we can and if we are neglectful of important truths we only ‘mask and render a final solution more difficult’. Mises continues:
“The problems involved are purely intellectual and must be dealt with as such. It is disastrous to shift them to the moral sphere and to dispose of supporters of opposite ideologies by calling them villains. It is vain to insist that what we are aiming at is good and what our adversaries want is bad. The question to be solved is precisely what is to be considered as good and what as bad. The rigid dogmatism peculiar to religious groups and to Marxism results only in irreconcilable conflict. It condemns beforehand all dissenters as evildoers, it calls into question their good faith, it asks them to surrender unconditionally. No social cooperation is possible where such an attitude prevails.”
The problem is that the public, most “intellectuals”, and politicians are totally clueless, calling them “evil” or immoral does nothing to overcome their economic ignorance and understandably ‘No social cooperation is possible where such an attitude prevails’. Mises continues:
“No better is the propensity, very popular nowadays, to brand supporters of other ideologies as lunatics. Psychiatrists are vague in drawing a line between sanity and insanity. It would be preposterous for laymen to interfere with this fundamental issue of psychiatry. However, it is clear that if the mere fact that a man shares erroneous views and acts according to his errors qualifies him as mentally disabled, it would be very hard to discover an individual to which the epithet sane or normal could be attributed.”
Similarly, the public, the “intellectuals” and politicians are not stupid or crazy either, they are simply going along with the myths, ‘incentive structures’ and ‘echo chambers’ of their day-environment. If we tell people that they are crazy or evil we misidentify the root cause of the problems and understandably create an adversarial combative relationship, if on the other hand we rightly tell people that regardless of their good intentions they are essentially following popular myths, we properly identify the problems, avoid the adversarial relationship, and motivate the myth-followers to prove or show that they are following the right ideas and thus engaging in peaceful dialogue.
The world of free market intellectuals and their various movements is very diverse. They are as diverse as the biases of the people who are attracted to their views on freedom. If we look at the ideological tree of ideas needed to understand the world, the trunk or foundation passes through or incorporates various evolutionary intellectuals like Charles Darwin, and Carl Menger and his numerous vital contributions like the subjective theory of value as well as his evolutionary insights which led him to properly explain the evolved (NOT human-designed) emergence of money and other market and socioeconomic mechanisms per our earlier quotes. Prior to Darwin, some God-given morality is how homo sapiens tried to act. Actions were either moral or immoral. In the post-Darwin world, the general welfare of mankind which includes increasing concerns about the environment, not some immutable God-ordained rules, began to take precedence. Sadly coercive central planning was an understandable massive error as the apes abandoned evolved religious customs which had been evolved to sustain families and thus protected some level of freedom and autonomy, and replaced such rules for inferior “rational” central planning. Menger saw morality as an evolved phenomena, he got both, the emergence and workings of the economy, as well as the look at morality and ethics correct. The Marxists and Keynesians could be seen as getting both wrong, the economy, as well as their ‘the ends justify the means’ attitude towards morality in their misguided quest to centrally plan. Let us now look at how various pro-freedom movements and associated ideologues made various errors and thus departures from Menger.
Let us look at the ‘Chicago School’ which for simplicity’s sake we’ll associate with the great 1976 Nobel Laureate in Economics Milton Friedman. Let us also just lump in all Non-Austrian academic movements or “schools” together here as well (I know, this is very crude). Friedman was superb at teaching basic economics, and his secular Jewish identity greatly helped him influence the very upper echelons of mainstream respectability where secular-Darwinian ethnic Jews are so influential. He also played a role helping Israel’s newly elected Likud government at the time move towards Capitalism , among countless other important contributions. The problem with the Friedmanites, ‘Chicago School’ and non-Austrian “academics” is that they were not riding the Mengerian evolutionary train. Their economics was too compartmentalized and not part of a complete evolutionary synthesis that could smoothly marry the emergence of both the biological and socioeconomic orders including culture, etc. This is why only ‘The Austrians’ would ambitiously write complete treatises like Mises’ ‘Socialism’ and later ‘Human Action’, or Hayek’s ‘Law, Legislation and Liberty’ trilogy. Non-Austrians, by NOT following Menger’s organic evolutionary approach also got too much into mathematics which is ultimately as absurd for the study of the workings and evolution of the socioeconomic order as it is for the biological one. How a single human being acts is at the very least the result of 80+ billion neurons joined by over 600 trillion synapses which have been created by the unique time and place circumstances of one individual whose very mind has been shaped by other complex evolved mechanisms like language, culture, etc. Only a myth-following priesthood of slightly smarter apes could think that mathematical modeling would be an important tool for understanding the complex workings and evolution of such complexity. Menger writes “I do not belong to the believers in the mathematical method as a way to deal with our science.” Mises, “As a method of economic analysis econometrics is a childish play with figures that does not contribute anything to the elucidation of the problems of economic reality." and "The Econometricians have not the slightest notion of the issues involved." The distinction between micro and macro economics is another “delusion” or myth Non-Austrians have created because they don’t understand how the economy or socioeconomic order, just like the biological one, must be understood as one intertwined, indivisible, and coevolved system. Hayek perfectly describes the evolving ‘Priesthood of Scientism’ and their math-based “magic” as he criticizes the “…delusion that macro-economics is both viable and useful (a delusion encouraged by its extensive use of mathematics, which must always impress politicians lacking any mathematical education, and which is really the nearest thing to the practice of magic that occurs among professional economists).”
Bottom line, only Menger and his evolutionary disciples can ‘put it all together’, as one of today’s leading intellectuals, Matt Ridley, humbly acknowledges:
“As someone who came to Fredrick von Hayek comparatively late in life, I’m still catching up with him…Indeed, many of the insights I thought I had discovered in my own readings and writings on the frontier of evolutionary biology and economics it turns out Hayek had long before me…It’s Hayek who first puts it all together.”
If Menger is correct, the main trunk of ideas continues in a path where morality is seen, not in absolute terms, but in a sort of constantly evolving manner. God-given, or some ‘natural rights’, or some objective or immutable ‘morality’ can be seen as branches in the tree of knowledge which although the sunlight absorbed by their leaves have provided the tree vital energy to keep growing in a pro-freedom and thus pro-order-civilization manner, these branches are essentially dead-end branches which can inadvertently mislead thinkers in ways that may ultimately ‘aggravate the evils which they mask and render a final solution more difficult.’
Menger’s evolutionary approach allows us to understand the evolution of all order, biological and socioeconomic and see homo sapiens as an animal inadvertently caught up in this evolving social organism, and see man’s violence and conflicts (like the Israeli(Zionist)-Palestinian conflict) as understandable fallacies since hardly anyone in the world has the slightest clue how freedom really works. The evolutionary approach is full of deep wisdom, understanding and sympathy, “Rights”-based approaches ultimately attempt to label some the “righteous”-good-moral and others the “rights-violators-immoral”-bad which ‘results only in irreconcilable conflict’. Let us next discuss two major pro-freedom intellectuals and their associated movements who ultimately deviated from Menger and based their morality in misguided non-evolutionary ways. Jews Ayn Rand, her ‘Natural Rights’-based ‘Objectivism’ ideology and pro-Zionism ideologues, and fellow Jew Murray N. Rothbard, his ‘Natural Rights’ ideology and anti-Zionism ideologues.
Although Rand and her intellectual descendants have helped many understand free markets and the vital need for freedom instead of government control, her ultimately simplistic and misguided ideology and some of its leading proponents like Yaron Brook and Leonard Peikoff (both Jews) ultimately spread fallacies that inevitably lead to a simplistic ‘good vs. evil’ mindset which is hardly indistinguishable from the simplistic pre-Darwinian religious understanding of the world. These fallacies play a significant role in spreading war and conflict, especially the chaos that emerges from Zionism and its resulting Israeli-Palestinian conflict and numerous ramifications, and thus ‘multiply the agonies, they intensify the hatreds, and make peaceful settlement impossible.’
Ayn Rand became popular because in her formative years she stumbled upon Menger’s descendant Ludwig von Mises. She picked up a good understanding of free markets from him which became the great foundation of her later writings. Ayn Rand mentions herself:
“As far as my economics and political economy are concerned, Ludwig von Mises is the most important thing that’s ever happened to me.”
But due to a complex mixture of ignorance, negligence, perhaps attention or glory seeking or other factors, Rand did not absorb other insights from Mises, Hayek and other ‘Austrians’ like their focus on economic education as the key to ensuring prosperity, a deeper understanding of the emergence and evolution of culture, history, religion, and a more ‘blame free’ approach that looked to unraveling the fallacies and misunderstandings that lead to conflicts instead of moral-good vs. immoral-evil pontifications.
Ayn Rand, like sadly so many “intellectuals” looking to achieve greatness became a “great intellectual” by using her Mises-provided economic insights to create a moral framework, Objectivism, and stressed that the key to saving civilization, was not through economic education and a careful analysis of the root evolutionary causes of social phenomena like ‘The Austrians’, but by philosophizing about what she thought was the correct morality, and thus her “Objectivism”.
From the very beginning, it didn’t properly occur to Rand that the reason why she was such a great defender of freedom was not because Mises pontificated about how immoral Communism was, but because he took the time to help people overcome the economic fallacies and more. Mises’ focus on ideas, not moral pontification, earned him the immense respect of leading Socialists like Oskar Lange who mentioned “In front of every socialist Ministry of Planning, there should be a statue of Ludwig von Mises.” She herself owed her relatively decent understanding of the world due to Mises’ economic education, yet she would abandon it for her moral pontification. She wrote a critical letter to Leonard E. Read, the great founder of ‘The Foundation for Economic Education’ where she writes:
“The mistake is in the very name of the organization. You call it The Foundation for Economic Education. You state that economic education is to be your sole purpose. You imply that the cause of the world’s troubles lies solely in people’s ignorance of economics and that the way to cure the world is to teach it the proper economic knowledge. This is not true — therefore your program will not work. You cannot hope to effect a cure by starting with a wrong diagnosis. The root of the whole modern disaster is philosophical and moral….The great mistake here is in assuming that economics is a science which can be isolated from moral, philosophical and political principles — and considered as a subject in itself, without relation to them. It can’t be done.”
She continues by criticizing Mises:
“The best example of that is Von Mises’ “Omnipotent Government.” That is precisely what he attempted to do — in a very objective, conscientious, scholarly way. And he failed dismally — even though his economic facts and conclusions were for the most part unimpeachable. He failed to present a convincing case — because at the crucial points, where his economics came to touch upon moral issues (as all economics must) — he went into thin air, into contradictions, into nonsense. He did prove, all right, that collectivist economics don’t work. And he failed to convert a single collectivist.”
Ayn Rand was wrong, by the time she even wrote that letter in February 28, 1946, not only had F.A. Hayek written his classic book ‘The Road To Serfdom’, but the great economic educators-Misesians like Henry Hazlitt and former leading American Socialist turned freemarketeer Max Eastman were getting the Reader’s Digest “condensed” version of Hayek’s book to over 1 million homes. Future champions of freedom like Margaret Thatcher and Ron Paul became so in large part thanks to Hayek’s book. Ron Paul writes:
“My introduction to Austrian economics came when I was studying medicine at Duke University and came across a copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. After devouring this, I was determined to read whatever I could find on what I thought was this new school of economic thought — especially the works of Mises”
Milton Friedman mentions:
“There is no figure who had more of an influence, no person who had more of an influence on the intellectuals behind the iron curtain than Friedrich Hayek. His books were translated and published… by the underground, and black market editions read widely and undoubtedly influenced the climate of opinion that ultimately brought about the collapse of the soviet union.”
Bottom line, to anyone who is really aware of the monumental contribution of ‘The Austrians’ it becomes easy to discard Objectivism and much of Rand’s work, except as inspiring novels and clever ways to help educate some. But when it comes to really understanding the world and how to improve it, there is no comparison. The intellectual difference between Rand and Mises was captured in a humorous way when Rand met Mises at Henry Hazlitt’s home. Hazlitt mentions:
“after dinner they were both sitting in our living room next to each other on the couch, and I was getting drinks. When I came in with the drinks, Lu and Ayn were having a terrible fight. Ayn was saying, “You think that I’m just a poor little Jewish girl who…” something like that. I just heard this part, and Lu was sitting down, and she was thundering all these things. And I said, “Oh, I’m sure Lu didn’t say that.” And she said, “He did say it!” Then I said, “Well, I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way.” And Lu was hard of hearing anyway, and he got up, and he said, “I did mean it that way.””
“I’m just a poor little Jewish girl” . Yes! In comparison to Mises, regarding intellectual achievements, that is precisely what Ayn Rand was. And Mises in his classic tell-it-like-it-is ‘You’re all a bunch of socialists” manner set her straight!
The naïve and simplistic Objectivist ideology and its good-moral vs. bad-immoral ramifications leads to dangerous simple-minded ideologues like arguably their most famous current intellectual Yaron Brook who mentions:
“Morality tells you one thing clearly. Unequivocally. The compromising and appeasing evil people only leads to more evil. So that the one thing you can not do is negotiate with them”
“appeasing evil people only leads to more evil”!!!!! Are we in 15th century Spain launching the Spanish Inquisition? Are we Jews in 100 BC deep in our Talmuds separating the world between the ‘Chosen People’ and others? WTF!!!???
We want to understand the complex evolution of the ideas and software that leads fellow homo sapiens to act, not naively get into the ‘moral sphere’ and call them good or evil. Hello McFly!
‘The Austrians’ did not see morality in objective terms, neither via Rand’s Objectivism, nor in a religion based manner, or any kind of so-called ‘Natural Law’. They understood how all ‘complex phenomena’ are ultimately the result of evolutionary processes, including morality and law. Mises writes:
“There is, however, no such thing as natural law and a perennial standard of what is just and what is unjust. Nature is alien to the idea of right and wrong”
and:
“The Utilitarians do not combat arbitrary government and privileges because they arc against natural law but because they are detrimental to prosperity. They recommend equality under the civil law not because men are equal but because such a policy is beneficial to the commonweal. In rejecting the illusory notions of natural law and human equality modern biology only repeated what the utilitarian champions of liberalism and democracy long before had taught in a much more persuasive way. It is obvious that no biological doctrine can ever invalidate what utilitarian philosophy says about the social utility of democratic government, private property, freedom, and equality under the law.”
Again:
“The arguments advanced by average politicians and writers against socialism are either silly or irrelevant. It is useless to stand upon an alleged “natural” right of individuals to own property if other people assert that the foremost “natural” right is that of income equality.”
Objectivism, religion-based morality, or ‘Natural Law’ are ultimately wrong ways of looking at law and morality and lead us away from a deeper understanding of how everything is ultimately the result of an evolutionary process per Menger and his descendants. Prior to Menger-friends we just had religion-derived good-moral vs. bad-immoral, after them we now have a deep understanding of how everything evolves and a ‘blame-free’ sympathetic approach, but the cultural inheritance or inertia of the moral approach is still overwhelming.
Let us now look at how today’s leading Objectivists apply a simplistic and naïve ideology in disastrous ways leading to so much conflict. Regarding ‘The Austrians’ Yaron Brook mentions:
“…the greatest tragedy maybe of the 20th century, certainly intellectually, is that brilliant economists like Hayek …. were not good at philosophy and didn’t really even understand what they were talking about when it came to markets themselves. And didn’t tragically take Ayn Rand seriously. If Hayek and Mises and all these guys had taken Ayn Rand seriously, Milton Friedman, we would be 50 years ahead in terms of changing the world.”
Of course Mises and Hayek didn’t ‘take Ayn Rand seriously’ because they had a far more profound understanding of the world. “poor little Jewish girl” writing inspiring novels is wonderful, but her Objectivism still gets far from the bullseye which must be hit in order to save civilization and may have inadvertently misled many away from vital ideas.
Rand’s simplistic Objectivism, lacking a richer evolutionary understanding of human nature caused Rand immense grief when she found out that her younger lover (25 years younger) was also having an affair with a super model. Rand’s lack of a more nuanced and complete evolutionary approach, sheer ignorance of history, and understandable naive bias towards ‘Jewish Identity’ since she was Jewish herself, was on full display on a Phil Donahue show appearance in 1979 where she was asked about US’s foreign policy with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She burst out with a simplistic and ignorant rant stating that :
“if you mean whose side one should be on, Israel or the Arabs, I would certainly say Israel because it’s the advanced, technological, civilized country amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years”.
The above kind of statement is what one would expect from superficial and naïve thinkers who are only looking at what seems obvious, instead of more root causes. Zionism, the idea that the fellow homo sapiens who “identify as Jews” are so different from the other homo sapiens that they must leave the real thousands of towns and Synagogues where for hundreds of years they were an integral part of Western Civilization to create a country based on religious mythology in an area already populated by others who had a different “identity” (Muslims, Christians, and fellow anti-Zionist Jews) and for numerous understandable reasons were adamantly opposed to the creation of a “Jewish State” in their surroundings, was, and remains, a monumental yet understandable error. Sometimes bright and caring people, as with countless Socialist and Communist movements, fool themselves into monumental errors or myths, and Zionism was yet another instance of this pattern. Few who really take the time to understand the complex history of Zionism and its effect on the region and the Palestinians would say something so simplistic, naive and insulting. Fellow Jew, Murray Rothbard, who inherited far far far more wisdom from Mises wrote a classic essay (‘War Guilt In The Middle East’) taking into account history and countless factors to help show how Zionism and resulting Israeli state had been a massive error.
The Ayn Rand Institute, a “think-tank” which supposedly attempts to spread her philosophy, likewise preaches naïve “civilized vs. uncivilized” type of thinking with “scholars” like Yaron Brook justifying preemptive nuclear strikes against “terrorist countries” like Iran and others. For example, he mentions:
“Whether you want to use a tactical nuke and wipe out Fallujah[Iraqi city with more than 320,000 people] , or you want to go in there house by house and take it out, or you know where their leaders are and you bomb their house and you eradicate them… that is all an issue of military tactics. I happen to believe that given the way the people of Fallujah behave…given the number of insurgents, that the best and most cost effective way of dealing with Fallujah and the one that minimizes the loss of American casualties is to flatten the place”…[discussing Iraq] “That is why our pathetic response in Iraq is even worse. What we should have done in my view is not bother with “Iraqi Freedom” and democracy and capitalism, blown the place to smithereens and gone to Tehran were the real enemy lies…”…“Iran is the spiritual root/source of Islamic terrorism. They invented Islamic terrorism in 1979 and since. They are the largest supporter of terrorism everywhere in the world”
Similar simplistic and IMHO uncivilized language is frequently espoused by leading ‘Randians’ like Leonard Peikoff who in an interview with Bill O’Reilly regarding Leonard’s desire for the US to preemptively attack Iran and have a regime change he mentioned:
“I’m absolutely not concerned with inocente people in the enemy territory. If they get killed that is the responsibility of their government for initiating aggression against us….If we hit the right country which is Iran, and with the full effective force of the United State and unseated the Iranian government… you would terrify the terrorist governments in the rest of the Middle East…. You don’t ignite a global conflict by eliminating an enemy that’s trying to exterminate you… We have a moral right to use nuclear or any other weapons that is considered by the military to be the most effective”
At some point O’Rilley tells him: “You’re crazy”.
Let us quote Yaron regarding Putin and the current Russia-Ukraine war. He mentions:
“Putin is evil and Biden is okay…Putin is evil, Biden not on the same scale…Putin is evil, Hillary probably not okay but bad but but not evil, not in the same scale …”
Obviously some Nobel-Prize winning insights. Only an intellectual descendent of Rand’s true greatness could help us see things so clearly so we know who to kill. Like most naïve ideologues, adversaries are seen as evil or mad or some weird combination, not as fellow homo sapiens acting based on complex ideas and circumstances that are ultimately the result of complex evolutionary factors. It is obvious to anyone who actually listens to Putin and Russian diplomats that the Russia-Ukraine war involved countless factors like NATO expansion, the fact that there were many ethnic Russians living in Eastern Ukraine who did not want to be ruled by Kiev, and many many other complex factors. Since Putin treats the Iranians and Syrians as fellow homo sapiens and not some caricature of “evil”, that is already enough for the most naïve American Republican Evangelical Christian politicians and Zionist Jews to portray him as some Hitler. To Yaron, ‘Putin is a Mystic’, just some somewhat irrational evil or mad guy who can only be stopped by the forces of good. He mentions:
“Putin is a Mystic. If you read Putin and if you read the philosophers that Putin reads, whether it’s Dugin which we’ve talked about or Ilian, these are the people that Putin really admires and really believes in and according to these people the Russian people are special… Russia is destined… to be an Empire destined to control Asia and Europe destined to cover from the Pacific… to the uh Eastern Atlantic all the way out to Portugal. This is Dugin’s Vision which ultimately Putin shares.”
The point of the above is that Rand’s simplistic ideology can persuade many secular thinkers and especially Jews into disastrous simplistic warmongering attitudes. We will revisit this soon.
Let us next discuss Murray Newton Rothbard. Rothbard and Rand both deviated from Menger’s evolutionary look at morality in favor of some more objective or more clearly defined ‘perennial standard of what is just and what is unjust.’ According to Rothbard, Rand “convinced him of the theory of natural rights.” (wiki) Unlike Ayn Rand who can be defined as a ‘minarchist’ who feels like government coercion to fund courts, police, and what is generally seen as needed to protect freedom and private property is legitimate, Rothbard was an ‘anarchocapitalist’ who believed that all encroachments on private property, including any kind of taxes to fund any government services were illegitimate or immoral and wrote that “the State is the enemy of mankind”…”a predatory gang of robbers, enslavers, and murderers”. These kinds of statements imply that government is something arising out of man-made reason with a malicious intent as opposed to a complex ‘naturally selected’ non-Human-designed or evolved structure per Menger, an error that led to countless errors like writing that “Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State”. The so-called ‘free market’ and State are complex social institutions which have co-evolved. Primates exchange favors, they have hierarchies-‘proto-governments’. Rothbard is basically saying with 100% certainty that the chicken came before the egg (or vice versa). If Rothbard wants to find the original “gang of robbers” who came up with the idea of setting up a state to conspire to rob and fool everyone he will need to find the geniuses that invented the market, money, private property, religion, etc. and refer to Menger, Mises, and Hayek as misguided for not observing the obvious. Rothbard’s constant focus on the individual, his quest for a rational and sort of ideal libertarian ethics or legal code, erroneously focuses too much on the individual-tree while overlooking the far more vital evolutionary factors shaping society-forest.
Even though Rothbard was an atheist like Rand, he did not share her animosity and moral fire against irrationality or religion, his animosity was towards violators of property rights with ‘The State’ and its wars as the main enemy. This, coupled with his second-to-none understanding of economic freedom, his ‘rights based’ morality, and many other factors made him a very appealing freedom fighter to many Christians or religious people who have inherited a religion-influenced ‘good-moral vs. evil-immoral’ mindset. Christians or religious people in general who rightly don’t feel like some clueless democratically elected apes get to decide what is right or wrong would find Murray very appealing. For example, the Ron Paul Revolutions of 2008–12 in the US, as well as the current freemarket revolution happening in Argentina led by freemarketeer Javier Milei both have strong moral condemnations of government where, per Rothbard, government is not so much seen as a complex evolutionary growth that is mostly the result of mass economic ignorance, but also of immorality and bad actors using the government to knowingly enrich themselves at the expense of society.
I’ve specifically mentioned how Rand and Rothbard were both born into Jewish culture. Let’s discuss related complex factors and ramifications. Even though both were Jewish and atheists, Rand would be strongly pro-Zionism-Israel and allegedly necessary wars against “antisemites” or critics of Zionism, while Murray was against the complex financial and ideological factors that lead to all wars, especially World War Two of which we say a few things next since as with Zionism and emerging Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it too was over Jew-Gentile misunderstandings and greatly contributed to the further evolution of the Zionist “identity” and resulting Israeli-Palestinian conflict and polarizing ramifications.
It is widely understood that the Treaty of Versailles forced upon the losing Germans after World War One had countless injustices, one of them being separating the German city of Danzig from the mainland by making it an enclave within, and largely controlled by, Poland. Most historians today and wise politicians during the lead-up to World War Two felt like Hitler’s demands that Danzig should be reunited with Germany were very reasonable and legitimate goals. For example, former US President Herbert Hoover criticized the Roosevelt Administration’s virulent anti-Hitler stance when he wrote:
“Another action by Mr. Roosevelt was his influence upon the Poles not to negotiate the question of Danzig. The adamant attitude of the Poles against negotiations received support from the Washington Administration. The separation of the German city of Danzig from Germany…had long been a cause of agitation by the Germans. Both were a part of vengeance and there was merit in the German claims. I had stated at one time that they should be corrected.”
In addition to usual antisemitic fallacies, the 1935 racist and anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, and the government sanctioned cruelty of events like Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938) where thousands of Jewish properties were vandalized, understandably led Jews and their sympathetic supporters in the US and British governments to prevent the peaceful reunification of Danzig and understandable polarization and expansion of the war as Hitler reunited Danzig by force by invading Poland with Stalin.
It is vitally important to understand that it was the increasingly polarizing hatreds between Nazi Germany and Jews which led to the war. Hitler of course fell for all sorts of intellectual errors like treating inadvertent Jewish overrepresentation in both Capitalism and Socialism as some sinister conspiracies or plots, seeing ‘The Jews’ as somehow biologically different and so on. And as an understandable reaction to Nazi antisemitism, Jews and rightly sympathetic supporters, not understanding the fallacies underpinning Hitler’s errors and antisemitism, did their utmost to destroy Nazi Germany. On January, 1934 (over 5 years before start of war) Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the most important and influential Zionist ideologues mentioned:
”For months now the struggle against Germany is waged by each Jewish community, at each conference, in all our syndicates, and by each Jew all over the world. There is reason to believe that our part in this struggle has general value. We will trigger a spiritual and material war of all the world against Germany’s ambitions to become once again a great nation, to recover lost territories and colonies. But our Jewish interests demand the complete destruction of Germany. Collectively and individually, the German nation is a threat to us Jews.”
These sorts of statements frequently blasted on leading newspapers in the USA and England for about 6 years, and their influence on sympathetic politicians, especially the already fiercely anti-German Roosevelt administration (Roosevelt had been Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy during WWI) would eventually lead to war at the staggering cost of 85+ million deaths and a massive expansion of Socialist mythology and resulting misery. The following two quotes further capture the Jew-Nazi nature of World War Two. American hero Charles Lindbergh was one of the many who recognized this and the monumental calamity that involving the USA in WWII was rightly bound to be.
And leading Jewish and Zionist ideologue Chaim Weizmann lets us know that ‘this war is our war and that it is being waged for the liberation of Jewry’:
US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s misguided socialist policies and sympathies, as well as US entry into WWII on the side of the anti-religion atheistic Communists led by Stalin of all people WTF!!???, was a nightmare to many Christians and anyone with enough common sense to realize that regardless of Hitler’s flaws, this worst possible outcome that occurred could have easily been avoided had real diplomacy instead of naive vilifications and inevitable polarizations ruled the day. It is important to realize that pre-War Nazi Germany was a paradise of civilization and morality compared to the Soviet Union at the time even for Jews. In his book “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” Timothy Snyder compares the lethality of both regimes prior to war in 1938:
”Soviet terror, at this point, was not only on a far greater scale; it was incomparably more lethal. Nothing in Hitler’s Germany remotely resembled the execution of nearly four hundred thousand people in eighteen months, as under Order 00447 in the Soviet Union. In the years 1937 and 1938, 267 people were sentenced to death in Nazi Germany, as compared to 378,326 death sentences within the kulak operation alone in the Soviet Union. Again, given the difference in population size, the chances that a Soviet citizen would be executed in the kulak action were about seven hundred times greater than the chances that a German citizen would be sentenced to death in Nazi Germany for any offense.”
But for very understandable reasons for which no one is to blame Jews were fixated on the antisemitic Hitler and his destruction, totally impervious to the monumental calamity via the world war they helped spark. Ok, so what does all of this have to do with free market ideologues? Compared to Rand, Rothbard had a far superior understanding of economics, history, and so much more, and thus easily knew that warmongering vs. Hitler leading to war, as well as Zionism had been massive errors. Free of any religious-like mysticism that saw Hitler as some non-homo sapiens evil caricature Murray knew that Hitler’s government was just as economically clueless as the rest, and saw Hitler’s foreign policy as very logical and wise. In a review of A.J.P. Taylor’s classic ‘The Origins of The Second World War’ Rothbard summarizes(read/listen):
“Hitler was not bent on world conquest, for which he had armed Germany to the teeth and constructed a “timetable.” Hitler, in brief, (in foreign affairs) was not a uniquely evil monster or daimon, who would continue to gobble up countries diabolically until stopped by superior force. Hitler was a rational German statesman, pursuing — with considerable intuitive insight — a traditional, post-Versailles German policy (to which we might add intimations of desires to expand eastward in an attack on Bolshevism). But basically, Hitler has no “master plan”; he was a German intent, like all Germans, on revising the intolerable and stupid Versailles-diktat, and on doing so by peaceful means, and in collaboration with the British and French. One thing is sure: Hitler had no designs, no plans, not even vague intimations, to expand westward against Britain and France (let alone the United States). Hitler admired the British Empire and wished to collaborate with it. Not only did Hitler do this with insight, he did it with patience, as Taylor excellently shows;”
Of course. The above is the truth. There was no need to go to war with Hitler. Yes! Hitler was an ‘antisemite’. He, like many others made numerous INTELLECTUAL ERRORS. Antisemitism MUST be seen as an intellectual error! Rooted in understandable fallacies, but for understandable reasons the slightly smarter apes, especially those who have absorbed a ‘Jewish Identity’ see it as some mythical ‘irrational evil’. Famous Jewish “intellectual” Walter Russel Mead writes regarding Theodor Herzl:
“He was driven to embrace his Jewish identity and the idea of Zionism by the realization that the irrational evil of Jew-hatred was an ineradicable force in modern Europe.”
Again, ‘irrational evil’. Nonsense. That mindset can only lead to polarizations and World Wars, ‘understandable fallacies’ IS the correct approach.
So back to Murray. One of the Christians who rightly and wisely opposed US entry into World War Two and had to also deal with the horror of also losing a son in this unnecessary horrendous war was Donald H. Rockwell, the father of Lew Rockwell who would go on to found the free market think tank the ‘Ludwig von Mises Institute’. Lew was friends with and a great admirer of Rothbard. Via his popular site lewrockwell.com, numerous friendships and connections in the relatively small world of real ‘Austrian Economics’ and history, men like Dr. Ron Paul, whose 2008 and 2012 presidential runs helped millions understand real free market economics, the numerous Mises institutes all over the world inspired by Lew’s American one, and numerous other factors… The above made Rothbard an unshakable foundation in terms of economics, real history and thus a proper understanding of Hitler and the easily avoidable disaster that World War Two, as well as all wars actually are, and also the never-ending chaos resulting from the Zionist error. This Rothbardian branch could see through most of the fallacies leading to war and the disaster that Zionism was bound to be, while the Randian branch lacking the intellectual tools needed to better understand history would naively fall for the most dangerous warmongering. As Mises writes:
“History speaks only to those people who know how to interpret it on the grounds of correct theories.”
The intellectual descendants of Rand and Rothbard understandably find themselves in opposite sides regarding Zionism and the never-ending warmongering that emerges from it like the Israel-Hamas war that started in Oct 9th, 2023. The following Yaron tweets are insightful:
Scott Horton is on the Rothbardian branch with a deep understanding of economics and history and has written superb books like Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism and Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and thus has a deep understanding of the Zionist disaster, can understand the ideas and circumstances that has the Palestinians so distraught, and is understandably against military escalations. But to naive Randianism this is just ‘delusional’ , ‘evasion of reality, of good and evil’. More from Yaron:
Just more of the same. Also:
Comedian Dave Smith (Jewish), another Rothbardian with a deep understanding of economics and history and thus fully aware of the Zionist-related disastrous ramifications, is likewise portrayed as “immoral”. See Dave’s podcast episode about Yaron’s treatment of him here. Bottom line, as Mises showed us, intellectual adversaries should not be labeled evil or stupid (“delusional”) and sadly this is where the Randian branch ultimately takes us.
Why is there so little genuine anti-war sentiment and proper criticism of Zionism in other free market think tanks like The Cato Institute, Reason, and more mainstream free market organizations? Before answering let us quote Hayek this time:
“Nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist — and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.”
If you only understand economics but not the vital history and evolution of the Zionist ideology-identity and resulting Israeli state, it is understandable how one ends up in the pro-Zionist camp and justifying, or at the very least not criticizing loudly enough, the tribalistic warmongering that the USA and Israel have been doing as a result of Jew-Gentile misunderstandings leading to Zionism. Both Socialism and Zionism are ideologies that understandably fooled many well-intentioned people towards disaster. Just like many Soviet-Socialists naively thought that they were right because the religious Americans and their ‘God given rights’ to freedom and private property had to be mythical nonsense, similar fallacies cause many smart and well-intentioned secular Jews to believe that Zionism is right-necessary. They see how they are for more freedom, equal rights for women, LGBT+ rights, the usual things you hear about how Israel is culturally-economically far more Western or ‘advanced’ compared to Islamic countries. Again, Rand is the cookie-cutter representative of such naive thinking when she mentioned:
“I would certainly say Israel because it’s the advanced, technological, civilized country amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years”
Just like there were layers of economic ignorance and understandable fallacies that led Socialists to fool themselves, there are layers of cultural evolution and complex history which keeps Zionists from overcoming their myths. It all just comes down to statistics, it is already difficult to stumble upon people who have had the fortune of properly understanding freedom-Capitalism, and then from that already small number to find those who have overcome Zionist fallacies, especially Jews for understandable reasons, is just a much smaller probability. For every Dave Smith and Sheldon Richman (author of the excellent ‘Coming to Palestine’ (free audio here)), Jews who have both, a superb understanding of ‘Austrian Economics’, as well as the complex history needed to see Zionism for the massive error that it was, you have thousands of “Zionized” Jews who lack both vital pieces of information. And although many free market organizations may have Jews that have overcome economic fallacies, few will understandably have hit the double-whammy of also overcoming Zionist ones, thus mainstream free market thinktanks understandably go along with all the “Neocon” wars and simplistic so-and-so (Putin) is the next irrational evil Hitler intent on world-domination type of nonsense and related fallacies. Thus we can see how the Randians and free market Zionists, regardless of their good intentions and much wisdom regarding economics, by pushing for naive ‘good vs. evil’ warmongering which grows from Zionist fallacies, they may end up doing far far far more harm than good. The ‘good vs. evil’ ideological mindset that understandably plays such a prominent role in Jewish, and even more so Zionist identity, is the swimmer’s kick that creates the naive ‘good vs. evil’ mindset that played a significant role in leading to WWII and obviously all the Israeli-Palestinian related chaos. Again! Nobody’s fault! the fallacies leading to the squabbles are “the unintended product of historical development”.
The Zionist mindset-identity-ideology inadvertently has to evolve to polarize the entire planet into a simplistic ‘us vs. them’ mentality and ultimately coerce and kill if necessary everyone who is for freedom because freedom and its emerging competition of ideas ultimately leads to 1) criticism of the Zionist fallacies-identity, and 2) freedom from financing all the Zionist-influenced wars like the Russia-Ukraine and Israeli-Hamas wars and obviously all the US-led wars in the Middle East. 3) There is a massive difference between criticizing Zionist “identity” for having fooled itself into immense harm, and seeing “The Jews” as malicious people, and unfortunately the Zionized masses lump the two together. For example CEO of the Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt has mentioned that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and also that “Anti-Zionism is genocide”. On Nov. 30th, 2023 the US House of Representatives passed a resolution stating “that denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism”. So although it is still not a criminal act in the USA to criticize Zionism, the Zionized-myth-believers are trying and increasingly succeeding.
Notice how in the USA everyone trying to talk to Putin and treat him as a fellow homo sapiens instead of some Biblical evil caricature is vilified as some vicious antisemite by Zionist Jews. Famous journalist Tucker Carlson who is rightly appalled by the lack of desire by top US officials like the Zionist Jew Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to even talk to Putin, is understandably hated by leading Zionists.
Although the Rothbardian branch of the ‘Natural rights’ tradition, given its far far far far far more profound understanding of history compared to the Randian branch properly sees US involvement in WWII and also support for Zionism as the massive fallacies that they were, it still suffers from the ‘Natural rights’ moral-based approach’s inherent fallacies, which leads it to mischaracterizing the Zionists as ‘evil’, immoral ,etc., instead of just understandably misguided-wrong. As with the Randians, it gets too deep into ‘the moral sphere’, and this is why when it comes to Zionism, the Randians and Rothbardians and their intellectual descendants are in a situation where “No social cooperation is possible where such an attitude prevails.”
I’d like to conclude by mentioning that, although not covered in this essay, Carl Menger’s insights into the evolved and thus undesigned emergence of money and thus all market phenomena like prices, economic competition, finance-banking, etc. is the ‘flux capacitor’ and vital insight needed to understand the complex evolution of the social order which includes all the misunderstandings leading to all the wars-chaos including our Jew-Gentile misunderstandings and emerging wars, and, again, vitally important, the nuanced ‘blame-free’ evolutionary approach needed to sooth the hatreds and work towards solutions. Getting the economics as well as the history is vital, but not enough, the entire Mengerian evolutionary paradigm which includes a ‘blame-free’ morality that is focused on understandable fallacies is also key.
