As a kid growing up in the 80s one of my favorite cartoons was ‘Voltron: Defender of the Universe.” The main characters would pilot 5 robotic lions who would eventually assemble to create Voltron, who’d use a massive sword to defeat the enemy. In this article I’ll briefly introduce 4 main thinkers and impactful friends associated with the ‘Austrian School of Economics’, and how they create the superhero needed to defend civilization from the economic and Zionist fallacies-myths that threaten it.
Besides properly grounding economics on the subjective (not labor) theory of value, founder of ‘The Austrian School’, Carl Menger(1840-1921), via his seminal “Principles of Economics” also provided what I like to call the “flux-capacitor” idea of the social sciences: Menger’s explanation of the evolution of money.
Private-sector economic competition turns the planet into a supercomputer as companies innovate and copy the innovations of competitors thus spreading superior information. Business profit-loss accounting ensures that the private sector is ordered in a manner where more wealth is produced (sales revenue) than consumed (costs) and is thus profitable-wealth-order-life increasing. Overcoming the double-coincidence-of-wants problem allows the benefits of trade like the expanding division of labor and information to apply to populations above small tribes. All three depend on or emerge from money. Without money and its emerging benefits, homo sapiens would not have progressed beyond the tribal stage. Menger showed how similar to language, which is a vital communication mechanism that man did NOT design or invent, money too and emerging ‘Social Organism’ is “the unintended result of individual human efforts (pursuing individual interests) without a common will directed toward their establishment.” The fact that money and emerging civilization was not deliberately designed is key for understanding how we live in this mind-bogglingly complex world with complex airplanes, the Internet, microchips, etc., yet hardly anyone has the slightest clue regarding how the economy works, and the masses naively clamor for self-mutilation via coercive competition-immune-monopolistic government planning and tribalistic good vs. evil wars.
During the Christmas holidays of 1903, while a student at the University of Vienna, Ludwig von Mises(1881-1973) read Carl Menger’s “Principles of Economics” and, in his own words, “It was through this book that I became an economist.” Among other contributions (see my article on Mises’ business cycle theory), via his 1920 essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth“, Mises showed how it was impossible for soviet-style central planning to work (see my article for a Mises-Hayek inspired critique of central planning). By persuading leading Austrian politicians away from joining the Bolsheviks, Mises also helped stop its calamitous expansion. Mises properly identified economic ignorance as the main source of mankind’s problems and felt like “all reasonable men are called upon to familiarize themselves with the teachings of economics. This is, in our age, the primary civic duty.” This ethos made him a brilliant and inspiring writer, the intellectual Atlas upon whose shoulders future generations would stand.
1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek(1899-1992) writes: “the decisive influence was just reading Menger’s Principles.” And that it was “such a fascinating book—so satisfying.” By having a job under Mises, especially in 1922 when Mises published his majestic “Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis”, and having Mises help him get a job at the prestigious London School of Economics, this catapulted Hayek to prominence in the 1930s-40s where he played a leading role fighting socialist and Keynesian myths in the English-speaking world. With the help of fellow Mises disciples Henry Hazlitt(1894-1993), and Max Eastman(1883-1969), Hayek’s 1944 book ‘The Road To Serfdom’, and its condensed 40-page Eastman-created version, helped educate millions including future freemarketeers like Ron Paul, Margaret Thatcher, and countless others. His classic essays like “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, “Competition as a Discovery Procedure”, “The Theory of Complex Phenomena”, “The Three Sources of Human Values” and many other writings-books helped us further understand the vital role that markets play in generating and spreading the information that coordinates the socioeconomic order, and the complex co-evolution of the market and culture, ultimately providing a complete evolutionary hypothesis-framework for understanding all order, biological and socioeconomic. Like Mises, Hayek too felt like “nothing could contribute more to the cure of humanity’s ills than to give people a better understanding of economics.”
Absorbing the Misesian econogospel and educational ethos, Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995, Jewish like Mises) would write his own treatise “Man, Economy and State”, which according to Mises improved-refined his ideas. Murray’s friend, great freedom-entrepreneur and founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, writes in a brilliant collection of Murray’s educational essays:
”[Murray] also had a passion for public persuasion. A free society can only be sustained if the general public is aware of the vital importance of the market and the terrible consequences of statism. That’s why Rothbard hoped to convince everyone about the virtues of the free economy. For Rothbard, educating the public was strategically necessary and morally obligatory.”
If economic competition motivates the discovery and spread of superior information, why not allow competition in law, courts, police, defense, and everything we naively assume must be done by inherited competition-immune bureaucracies? Murray was a pioneer in these ideas referred to as Anarcho-Capitalism and described in his books like “For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto”
Mises:
“History speaks only to those people who know how to interpret it on the ground of correct theories.”
Rothbard used his Misesian glasses to better understand history, how perverse incentives in competition-immune governments grew state power, propagated myths of all kinds, and most importantly, promoted WAR. Murray rightly saw wars, not as necessary simplistic-tribalistic battles of good-homo-sapiens vs. bad-homo-sapiens, but as the result of complex historical events and negligent-ignorant ideologues. Murray knew, and had the courage and integrity to state, that the US should have never gotten involved in WWI, that Zionism was a monumental error, and how naive politicians, not Hitler, were the main culprits in sparking and expanding the WWII calamity.
Yes! Hitler held anti-Jewish fallacies, like misinterpreting Jewish overrepresentation in the horrific Bolshevik revolution and resulting Communist movements with some deliberately malicious plot masterminded by Jews and-or also tied to their “race”. These are very understandable and easy-to-overcome fallacies. But it was also a fallacy to neglect-overlook Hitler’s fallacies, and misrepresent Hitler as some non-homo sapiens maniacal conqueror, and prevent him from overturning the wrongs of the ‘Treaty of Versailles’ like reuniting the Danzig Germans, forcing Hitler to do it by force, and then persuading the world into a massive world war. Rothbard writes in a review of A.J.P. Taylor’s classic book, “The Origins of the Second World War”:
“Germany and Hitler were not uniquely guilty of launching World War II (indeed they were scarcely guilty at all);…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 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.”
Understandable economic fallacies fooled many into adopting Socialist mythology, morality, and “identity”. Similarly, as an understandable reaction to ‘anti-Jewish fallacies’, Jews fooled themselves, and rightly sympathetic supporters, into attempting to overcome anti-Jewish fallacies, NOT via reason and education, which are the ONLY ways to overcome fallacies, but by abandoning the humble Synagogues and towns where they were really from to create a secular and socialist state in an area already overwhelmingly populated by Muslims, Christians, and fellow anti-Zionist Jews. People who for understandable reasons were adamantly opposed to the creation of, and potentially living under a “Jewish State”. A state concocted by misguided European ideologues who inherited some of the imperialist-racist and Socialist fallacies of their times. For example, David ben Gurion, Israel’s architect and first Prime Minister, eagerly attended Moscow in 1923 to celebrate the 7th-anniversary of the Bolsheviks’ October Revolution.
Zionism, as with Socialism, was a massive intellectual error propagated by respective echo-chambers of fallacies-myths, negligence, perverse incentives, and ultimately violence-coercion. Like the Russians, Jews increasingly tied their “identity” and morality to an error and eventually reach the stage where we are today, where saying that Zionism and resulting Israeli state was an error is seen as hate-speech. CEO of the ADL Jonathan Greenblatt mentioned that: “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism”, and that: “Anti-Zionism is genocide”. Israeli author of the great books ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’, and ‘The Invention of the Land of Israel’, Shlomo Sand, astutely mentioned that: “Zionism has become…a sort of Stalinism.”
Rothbard’s classic essay ‘War Guilt in the Middle East’(1967) succinctly summarizes the inevitable fallacy that Zionism was bound to be. With Murray and friends, our freedom-superhero is better equipped to overcome, both, economic and Zionist myths-fallacies.
