P.E.’s Reviews > Interventionism: An Economic Analysis > Status Update

Full quote :

'Frequently, we hear the assertion that the democratic institutions are only a disguise for the "dictatorship of capital." The Marxists have used this slogan for a long time. Georges Sorel and the syndicalists repeated it. Today Hitler and Mussolini ask the nations to rise up against "plutodemocracy." In answer to this it suffices to point out that in Great Britain, in the British Dominions, and in the United States the elections are completely free of coercion. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president by a majority of the voters. Nobody forced any American citizen to vote for him. Nobody prevented anyone from voicing publicly what he considered an argument against the re-election of Roosevelt. The citizens of America were free to decide, and they did decide.'

=> Conditions may well have been different in 1940, still, you have to consider the amount of private & corporate tax-free donations funding political campaigns. You can't understate the importance of such subsides & publicity in democratical elections (e.g. in the USA & France) : you can't just infer democracy from people freely voting for their political representatives, you have to take the process as a whole.

That doesn't invalidate Ludwig von Mises' whole point but calls for nuance & discussing the necessary conditions for a meaningful democracy to take place.

It was never entirely true, but it's less so than ever.

I agree with that. Also, take the education system into consideration too, while you are at it, right?

One of the undermentioned effects of the disease of advertising is the entrenchment of privilege and the creation of "aspirational" good and services. Like religion, consumer capitalism separates ppl into upper and lower, good and bad, worthy and un-. So its effect on elections is to exacerbate the existing divides between points of view, to sell the candidate: "We're right, they're wrong."

And yes, I subscribe to the view that right-wing nativist religious assholery is evidence of low intellect and nonexistent moral sense, but I was suckled on advertising, wasn't I.

This essay is actually raising the question whether interventionism - funding, fixing prices, tariffs & production, taxing income & property - offers a viable replacement to capitalism / market economy (i.e. private ownership of the means of production), be it socially, politically or economically.

LvM posits it doesn't and that capitalism / the market economy fits parliamentary democracy like a glove, being the system that best satisfies the needs of the consumers as a whole, unlike all brands of interventionism, evolving necessarily into socialism according to him (i.e. public ownership of the means of production) and its various forms : fascism/pseudo corporativism, Nazi or Communist totalitarianism.

Spoken like a well-fed academic in a publicly funded university depending on a socialist infrastructure to live his privileged life slinging rotten eggs at The System.

Fucking adolescent twaddle, like all libertarian/free marketeering true believers.

Don't forget it was written in 1940, the heyday of totalitarian regimes... Other excerpts hinging round the same principles :

'This analysis is intended merely to explain that the economic policy of interventionism, which is advertised by its advocates as a progressive socio-economic policy, is based on a fallacy. This book demonstrates that it is not true that interventionism can lead to a lasting system of economic organization. The various measures, by which interventionism tries to direct business, cannot achieve the aims its honest advocates are seeking by their application. Interventionist measures lead to conditions which, from the standpoint of those who recommend them, are actually less desirable than those they are designed to alleviate. They create unemployment, depression, monopoly, distress. They may make a few people richer, but they make all others poorer and less satisfied. If governments do not give them up and return to the unhampered market economy, if they stubbornly persist in the attempt to compensate by further interventions for the shortcomings of earlier interventions, they will find eventually that they have adopted socialism.

'The victories which Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler have won were not defeats of capitalism but the inescapable consequences of interventionist policy. Lenin defeated the interventionism of Kerensky. Mussolini won his victory over the syndicalism of the Italian trade unions which culminated in the seizure of factories. Hitler triumphed over the interventionism of the Weimar Republic. Franco won his victory over the syndicalist anarchy in Spain and Catalonia. In France the system of the front populaire collapsed and the dictatorship of Petain followed.'

'It is not an accident that everywhere, with the progress of interventionism, the democratic institutions have disappeared one after the other and that, in the socialist countries, oriental despotism has been able to stage a successful comeback. [...]

----

This precise idea - oriental despotism - has been busted by Jack Goody in The Theft of History. Here is the extract retranslated from my French copy :

[In the Ottoman Empire] Peasants, as well as merchants enjoyed the protection of tribunals as to their activities, and women were liable to be called to testify in court. The idea of asian despotism, as we can see, represented the means for Europe to deny the legitimacy of these states, first in Ancient Greece, then in the scholars' writings in the post-Renaissance era.'

----

'Mankind has a choice only between the unhampered market economy, democracy, and freedom on the one side, and socialism and dictatorship on the other side. A third alternative, an interventionist compromise, is not feasible. [...]

If there is anything history could teach us it would be that no nation has ever created a higher civilization without private ownership of the means of production and that democracy has only been found where private ownership of the means of production has existed.'

Again, this idea has been challenged by Jack Goody, who states Western countries pretend they have invented capitalism and private property, when China has a multisecular mercantile tradition allowing them to operate the silk roads & porcelain roads, among others...

Wish the old jackanapes was alive to see China!

Hey! Chips!, as friends traditionnally say to one another in French when they unwittingly utter the same thing at the same moment ;) Feel free to check the couple of edits above!

By the way, I should add it was quite entertaining to see statuettes and other hm, likenesses of Europeans in the French East India Company Museum last week ;)

Here is, that is, if you feel like watching Westerner-shaped garden gnomes.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folder...

>9 Ha! I should have known you'd bring that up.

>10 Ha!! Hilarious.

Oh hey, next time you go, maybe walk out with these?
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I would just love to get these for Yule~

I can't see the image you've shared, visibly :(