A forbidden man and his forbidden work, vindicated
It’s true what they say: bad news sells. Before the virus, whenever I would send out an email with good news, far fewer people would open it than if the subject line implied something catastrophic.
I never understood this. Why wouldn’t you want a bit of happiness in your day?
Since the virus, though, I specialize in (a kind of) good news. The charts I share show that we achieve the same numbers when it comes to mitigation whether or not we wear masks and whether or not we endure lockdowns.
That’s good news, because it shows these interventions are unnecessary.
I talk about the successes being enjoyed in places that have removed all restrictions.
Or I show that the numbers just go up and down seasonally and regionally, and that we shouldn’t be reproaching ourselves for our “bad behavior,” since the virus very obviously does not care about our behavior.
But today I have a different kind of positive message: a brief celebration of a great man.
A great man, I might add, whom your teacher never told you about.
September 29th marked 140 years since the birth of Ludwig von Mises (pictured), who was much more than an economist — but as an economist he was almost without peer.
His works — like Socialism, Human Action, and The Theory of Money and Credit — were of the highest importance.
His immovable opposition to state control of society and economy made him an inveterate foe of the Nazi regime, and thus he had to flee to the United States in 1940.
Mises spoke some English but had done his scholarly work in German, so he faced that problem.
Even worse was that in the 1940s any half-Marxian nobody could get a job in American academia, but the laissez-faire Mises wound up in an unpaid position at New York University — where he quietly trained the great minds of the rising generation.
Today, nobody can name a single member of the economics department at NYU from, say, 1967.
But the name of Mises lives on, both in the institute that bears his name and in the robust tradition of the Austrian School of economics (a school of thought, not a literal school).
When the financial crisis of 2008 struck, the establishment flailed around for an explanation — since none of them had seen any problems on the horizon.
Followers of Mises knew full well what had happened: when the central bank (in our case the Federal Reserve) artificially expands credit and pushes interest rates below their market level, it sends the economy into an unsustainable configuration that ends in a bust.
I told the story in my 2009 book Meltdown, a New York Times bestseller that featured a foreword by Ron Paul.
And outside of economics, when I look at universities today, many of whom have the stupidest and most anti-science COVID restrictions of all (and with students who seem all too happy to comply and to snitch on their neighbors), I am reminded of one of my favorite Mises quotations:
“Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them.”
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Zoe Phin
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Yay! Mises is fantastic.
I managed to get an Economics degree from an elite university without learning a single thing about him, only to then read his great works while working on Wall Street.
Highly recommend.
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J Cuttance
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Good for you. I knocked Human Action off last year with the help of Bob Murphy’s study guide. It’s got more wisdom than anything else I’ve ever read.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Tom, Zoe and hopefully other PSI readers.
This comment is only about something that might be. So be warned.
Maybe many PSI Readers, who are reading this, do not know the history of Zoe, the economist, .here at PSI. But she, like Robert Beatty, a mining engineer, had studied, as a hobby (I conclude), the SCIENCE involved in the ideas of the Greenhouse Effect of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, the proposed cause of the proposed Global Warming, and the proposed cause of the proposed Unnatural Climate Change. And these two amateurs do a better job than most ‘trained’ Professional Scientists. (my opinion).
But I doubt if Zoe (and Tom Woods) are aware of the parallels between the generally unknown Mises, the economist, and Galileo Galilei, the scientist. This even though most everyone is familiar with Galileo but very few modern Scientists have ever read what Galileo wrote. For in 1638 Galileo’s book was published in the common Italian language of that time and a commonly available translation to the English language by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio was published in 1914. So for about two centuries English Science professors, who could not read the Italian language, could never suggest that their students read what Galileo wrote. And because these professors, had done quite WELL without reading what Galileo wrote, they never suggested to students, like myself, that we should read what Galileo wrote. And I know that as a chemistry instructor for twenty years, I had never read his book. So I obviously could not suggest to my students that they might profitably read it.
I like to quote the wisdom of successful people. One of these is: “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” (A. Einstein)
I have pondered this quote and questioned to whom (or what) is Einstein referring??? However, I have just read a bit of his early history and established that he had attended a Swiss school; and therefore could have learned to read Italian and therefore could have read Galileo’s book in the language in which it was written and published.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Shawn
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I think Hayek should be mentioned along with Misez and he is much more readable for us plebeians.,
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John Doran
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I like the Austrian school, but for me the economist sans pareil is Julian Simon.
He took money off arch doomsters Paul Ehrlich & John Holdren in a bet about resources & prices.
A good introduction to his work is contained within nuclear PhD engineer Robert Zubrin’s great book Merchants Of Despair, where he exposes the Nazi roots of the “green” movement & outlines some important truths about nuclear power.
Simon’s book The Ultimate Resource 2 is a joyous read, & I never thought I’d be typing that about an economics book in this lifetime!
The ultimate resource is human ingenuity.
JD.
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