Ralph Raico > Quotes

“(P58) It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on “great leaders,” Churchill’s worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.”
― Ralph Raico, Great Wars And Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal

“(P170) In his passion to malign moneymaking, Keynes even resorted to calling on psychoanalysis for support. Fascinated like most of the Bloomsbury circle by the work of Sigmund Freud, Keynes valued it above all for the “intuitions” which paralleled his own, especially on the significance of the love of money . In his Treatise on Money, Keynes refers to a passage in a 1908 paper by Freud, in which he writes of the “connections which exist between the complexes of interest in money and of defaecation” and the unconscious “identification of gold with faeces.” This psychoanalytical “finding”— by the man Vladimir Nabokov correctly identified as the Viennese Fraud— permitted Keynes to assert that love of money was condemned not only by religion but by “science” as well.”
― Ralph Raico, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School

“The nation as such is not a large subject that has needs, that works, practices economy, and consumes. . . . Thus the phenomena of “national economy” . . . are, rather, the results of all the innumerable individual economic efforts in the nation and . . . must also be theoretically interpreted in this light. . . .Whoever wants to understand theoretically the phenomena of “national economy” . . . must for this reason attempt to go back to their true elements, to the singular economies in the nation, and to investigate the laws by which the former are built up from the latter.”
― Ralph Raico, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School

“(...) What the Industrial Revolution did for the first time was allow women an independent source of income. They didn't have to go from their father's house immediately into the house of their husband, and then for the rest of their lives remain under the thumb of their husband regardless of how he chose to behave and conduct himself for the years to come. Women could go out and work in a factory, and that was experienced as an enormous liberation by women. To take the example of America, there were the textile factories of New England, the cigarette factories of the Carolinas and Virginia, and so on. Afterwards, when the telephone came in, there were hundreds of thousands of female telephone operators. This was a liberation from the psychological cage that very often the husband-dominated family was. She was bringing in her own income, so she had a certain place in the family for that reason. Or, if it came to that, "to hell with the louse," and she could go out and make a living on her own. We see this in third world countries as well. The factory system and the other accoutrements of industrial capitalism were a liberation for women. This explains why legislation to limit the work of women and exclude women from certain occupations, or limit the hours women could work, and so on, were pushed not by women's groups but by the male-dominated labor unions. It was to do away with the increasing competition that women presented to male union labor.”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“(...) we were told capitalism could not compete with socialism. Capitalism was accused of promoting automation, leading to catastrophic permanent unemployment in the 1960s...”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“That Spanish or late Scholastic school went into oblivion, although some of them, Suarez and Vitoria especially, were occasionally remembered. Everybody admitted the Scholastics had a tremendous influence on political theory in the line of Samuel Pufendorf and Hugo Grotius that winds up with John Locke. But somehow these Iberians were later left out of the picture.”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“(...) Before this, the liberals-many of them—had felt that the state was essentially a neutral device that could be utilized in favorable conditions to bring about many valuable reforms in society. After the revolution, many liberals now saw the state as a locus of constant threats to freedom and as a self-interested enemy—a standing enemy-and perpetual enemy of civil society.”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“Mill's view tends to erase the rather critical distinction, I would say, between "incurring social disapproval and incurring imprisonment." It leads to pitting liberalism against innocent, noncoercive traditional values and arrangements, especially religious ones. It also forges an offensive alliance between liberalism and the state- even if contrary to Mill's intentions- since it is hard to see how one can be sure of uprooting traditional norms except through the massive use of political power...”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“(...) By the way, it was another secession, just as with the American Confederate states. The Dutch didn't want to take over the Spanish Empire. They just wanted to withdraw from the Spanish Empire, as the American colonists wanted to withdraw from the British Empire. And after a very long struggle of decades, the Dutch finally did. What they set up became a model for Europe for decades and was the first European economic miracle or "Wirtschaftswunder."25”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“(...) This change was based on the steady accumulation of more objective, less politically contaminated data. The change included the refinement of statistical techniques and the application of better economic theory. The earlier view had largely been based on the "blue books" collected by Parliament and the House of Commons's commissions on the condition of working people in the mid-nineteenth century and after that. These are called blue books, and what was behind these commissions is of interest and importance.”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“The Austrian position is that the conflict “is a question of our survival.” The thinking was that if Serbia can get away with this, very soon it will be the end of a very ancient empire, and a country, a nation, is entitled to fight for its survival. What are the Russians fighting for? They’re fighting for prestige and for one of their protégés...”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“(...) Spanish or late Scholastic school went into oblivion, although some of them, Suarez and Vitoria especially, were occasionally remembered. Everybody admitted the Scholastics had a tremendous influence on political theory in the line of Samuel Pufendorf and Hugo Grotius that winds up with John Locke. But somehow these Iberians were later left out of the picture.”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“(...) I want to say that there were Europeans who opposed those various crimes of the men of power in their own countries, and among them-among the most prominent-were the classical liberals that we'll be talking about this week.”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“Bakunin noticed that in The Communist Manifesto agriculture is to be conducted by vast armies of agricultural laborers. Bakunin said, an army means that there are soldiers and there are officers—and what have we got here? These vast armies working the fields and the plantations. What we have here is the Roman latifundium again. What we have here is a new system of slavery, under a new ruling class.

Well, Marx didn’t want to hear this. Correspondence between Marx and Engels—I haven’t actually checked it out except for certain theoretically important letters—is filled with ethnic and racial slurs, mainly against their socialist and anarchist opponents. But Bakunin himself said that Marx’s position is very typically Jewish and German, Bakunin being Russian and not Jewish. This is somewhat amusing, but Bakunin’s analysis is part of an interesting episode in the nineteenth-century history of radicalism...”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“Mises and Hayek Beginning with Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, the links between liberalism and the Austrian School become intense and pervasive, since these two scholars were themselves at once the outstanding Austrian economists and the most distinguished liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. The American academic world, however, deemed none of this sufficient for them to be accorded the kind of positions to which they were clearly entitled.50 They, and in particular Mises, were also responsible to a greater degree than is generally appreciated for the upsurge of the free-market philosophy in the second half of the century.51 But since the views of the two great men are so often amalgamated, it should be emphasized that not only did they differ to an extent on economic theory (Salerno 1993; see also Kirzner 1992c: 119–36), but, more pertinently to the theme of this essay, they exhibited a sharp distinction in the degree of their liberalism. What follows refers to Hayek’s political attitudes, not to his contributions to economic science. These were highly significant and valuable in the earlier part of his career, as he together with Mises built the theoretical foundations of the modern Austrian school.52 While Mises was a staunch advocate of the laissez-faire market economy (Mises 1978a; Rothbard 1988: 40; Hoppe 1993; Klein 1999), Hayek was always more open to what he saw as the useful possibilities of state action. He had been a student of Wieser’s, and, as he conceded, he was “attracted to him . . . because unlike most of the other members of the Austrian School [Wieser] had a good deal of sympathy with [the] mild Fabian Socialism to which I was inclined as a young man. He in fact prided himself that his theory of marginal utility had provided the basis of progressive taxation . . .” (Hayek 1983: 17). Early in his career, Hayek stated that the lessons of economics will create a presumption against state interference, adding: However, this by no means does away with the positive part of the economist’s task, the delimitation of the field within which collective action is not only unobjectionable but actually a useful means of obtaining the desired ends. . .the classical writers very much neglected the positive part of the task and thereby allowed the impression to gain ground that laissez-faire was their ultimate and only conclusion . . . (1933: 133–34) This remained Hayek’s standpoint throughout his long and richly productive scholarly life. It is regrettable, but typical, that a great many confused commentators continue to characterize him as a advocate of laissez-faire.53 In fact, he”
― Ralph Raico, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School

“(...) He prohibited the inhabitants of Sicily or Naples from going to other places to study at the university. To keep control, he established the prototype of the secret police and he was involved famously in a conflict with the papacy and defeated, ultimately. In one of his writings, Frederick praised happy Asia, "felix Asia." By "Asia," he meant anywhere in the East, where, he says, "rulers need not fear the weapons of their subjects and the machinations of priests."20”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought

“Revisionism as it pertains to historical interpretation is an absolute necessity. What’s the alternative to revisionism? The alternative to revisionism is simply to believe the victorious state’s story about how the war began, how it was conducted, and what the consequences of the war were. Without revisionism, we end up believing the propaganda that a state involved in a war always puts out and always tries to spread. Unless that’s revised in some way, then what we’re left with is simply a tissue of very childish lies.”
― Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought