The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality

How one carries on in the face of unavoidable catastrophe is a matter of temperament. In high school, as was custom, I had chosen a verse by Virgil to be my motto: Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito. Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it. I recalled these words during the darkest hours of the war. Again and again I had met with situations from which rational deliberation found no means of escape; but then the unexpected intervened, and with it came salvation. I would not lose courage even now. I wanted to do everything an economist could do. I would not tire in saying what I knew to be true. +

On the unhampered market there prevails an irresistible tendency to employ every factor of production for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers. If the government interferes with this process, it can only impair satisfaction; it can never improve it. +Ludwig von Mises, 1881-1973


The response to my recent blogs on capitalism has been amazing. With each post the email flew in. What’s more, these notes were not one or two sentences of approbation or disagreement but were, for the most part, well thought out queries and observations.

One of the most frequent requests was for reading recommendations. The book I usually suggested was Ludwig von Mises’ The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. It is succinct (about 130 pages), very readable and, while written in 1956, very relevant to our present contemporary economic crisis.

Here is just one passage:

The fundamental dogma of this creed (he is writing about progressivism) declares that property is an outcome of iniquitous social institutions. The original sin that deprived mankind of the blissful life in the Garden of Eden was the establishment of private property and enterprise. Capitalism serves only the selfish interest of rugged exploiters. It dooms the masses of righteous men to progressing impoverish- ment and degradation. What is needed to make all people prosperous is the taming of the greedy exploiters by the great god called State. The “service” motive must be substituted for the “profit” motive. (MEW: You’d think he was reading today’s headlines!) Fortunately, they say, no intrigues and no brutality on the part of the infernal “economic royalists” can quell the reform movement. The coming of an age of central planning is inevitable. Then there will be plenty and abundance for all. Those eager to accelerate this great transformation call themselves progressives precisely because they pretend that they are working for the realization of what is both desirable and in accordance with the inexorable laws of historic evolution.

From the point of view of these dogmas the progressives advocate certain policies which, as they pretend, could alleviate immediately the lot of the suffering masses they recommend, e.g., credit expansion and increasing the amount of money in circulation, minimum wage rates to be decreed and enforced either by the government or by labor union pressure and violence, control of commodity prices and rents and other interventionist measures. But the economists have demonstrated that all such nostrums fail to bring about those results which their advocates want to attain. Their outcome is, from the very point of view of those recommending them and resorting to their execution, even more unsatisfactory than the previous state of affairs they were deigned to alter. Credit expansion results in the recurrence of economic crisis and periods of depression. Inflation makes the prices of all commodities and services soar. The attempt to enforce wage rates higher than those the unhampered market have determined produce mass unemployment prolonged year after year. Price ceilings result in a drop in the commodities affected. The economists have proved these theorems in an irrefutable way. No “progressive” pseudo-economist ever tried to refute them.

The essential charge brought by the progressives against capitalism is that the recurrence of crisis and depressions and mass unemployment are its inherent features. The demonstration that these phenomena are, on the contrary, the result of the interventionist attempts to regulate capitalism and to improve the conditions of the common man give the progressive ideology the finishing stroke. As the progressives are not in a position to advance any tenable objection to the teachings of the economists, they try to conceal them from the people and especially from the intellectuals and the university students. Pages 59-61

If you want to be armed and ready to debate those who want to trash our God-given freedoms (unalienable rights), if you want rational arguments in response to those who appear to be taking the moral high ground by speaking of “compassion” and “justice,” and if you’d like to get to the heart of anti-capitalist bias that is exploding across the US, this book by Mises is a great place to start.

Copyright, Monte E Wilson, 2009