Ludwig von Mises, as he should be remembered

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5915061

Quoting Hayek: A Collaborative Biography: Part III, Fraud, Fascism and Free Market Religion, page viii:

Lieutenant Ludwig ‘von’ Mises (1881–1973), free marketeer; aristocrat; […] employee of the Foundation for Economic Education; Austro‐Fascist (Vaterländische or Patriotic Front) member № 282632; Austro‐Fascist social club (Werk Neues Leben) member № 406183; co‐leader of the third‐generation Austrian School of Economics, known to his disciples as ‘The Last Knight of Liberalism’. In his defining work, Liberalism in the classical tradition, he declared:

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.

According to The Last Knight of Liberalism, Mises was FEE’s ‘spiritus rector’ — literally: ‘Führer’ or ‘ruler’.

Some capitalist apologists have claimed that Mises was forced to join the Austrofascists, but we have no good reason to believe this. As much as propertarians may grumble about ‘state interference’ and how it contradicts their idealistic redefinition of capitalism, they have demonstrated time and again that they have no issue with the state when it is oppressing undocumented immigrants, massacring or torturing (suspected) communists in Chile, and protecting private property, to name but a few examples. Hence, the pipeline between propertarianism and fascism is hardly a lengthy one.

Robert Leeson goes on, pages 5–6:

The ‘similar movements’ of ‘bloody counteraction’ that Mises referred to included the French anti‐Semitic Action Française plus ‘Germans and Italians’. ‘Italians’ obviously refers to Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome; Mises’ (1985 [1927], 44) reference to ‘Ludendorff and Hitler’ means the 1923 Ludendorff‐Hitler‐Putsch (or Munich Beer Hall Putsch).

Mises (1985 [1927], 49) predicted that:

The deeds of the Fascists and of other parties corresponding to them were emotional reflex actions evoked by indignation at the deeds of the Bolsheviks and Communists. As soon as the first flush of anger had passed, their policy took a more moderate course and will probably become even more so with the passage of time.

Misesian liberals and Fascists were allies, but differed in tactics:

What distinguished liberal from Fascist tactics is not a difference of opinion regarding the use of armed force to resist armed attackers, but a difference in the fundamental estimation about the role of violence in a struggle for power.

Violence was ‘the highest principle’ and must lead to

civil war. The ultimate victor to emerge will be the faction strongest in number […] The decisive question, therefore always remains: How does one obtain a majority for one’s own party? This however is purely an intellectual matter.

Fascism would have to embrace Mises’ (1985 [1927], 50) liberalism to achieve their common aims; if Fascism ‘wanted really to combat socialism it would oppose it with ideas.’ Mises would provide these ideas: ‘There is however only one idea that can be effectively opposed to socialism, viz, liberalism.’ Mises provided an historicist inevitability justification: ‘Fascism will never succeed as completely as Russian Bolshevism from freeing itself from the power of liberal ideas […] The next episode will be the victory of communism.’

Mises’ political activity was consistent with his ideology: on 1 March 1934, he joined the Austro‐Fascist Patriotic Front and their Werk Neues Leben social club (Hülsmann 2007, 677, n149). Mises may also have been a victim of propaganda: his justification for this tactical embrace was that fascists would protect property — the protection of which he saw as the very essence of liberty.

Meanwhile, tax‐evading fascist kleptocrats were eying Jewish property; in the Anschluss of March 1938, Austria was reunited with Austrian‐led Germany, and the Austrian Adolf Eichmann opened the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. The decree on the Declaration of Jewish Assets revealed fascism to be a conveyor belt along which Jews had their property confiscated before being exterminated or driven abroad.

As The Last Knight of Liberalism bemoaned: ‘Mises family property had become free booty’ (Hülsmann 2007, 728, 677, n149). The Jewish‐born Mises was lucky to escape with his life; he devoted much of the rest of it to describing his opponents as ‘Fascists’.

I’ve noticed that anticommunists who have displayed respect for fascism or neofascism (Winston Churchill, A. James Gregor, Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum & alia) seem to be especially fond of trying to equate us with fascists, usually by focussing on whatever superficial and petty similarities that they can find while completely omitting any and all similarities between liberal régimes and fascist ones.

The blockheadedness in these false equivalences should be especially obvious here: if communism was equal to fascism, yet these anticommunists sympathized with fascism or neofascism anyway, then logically they might as well have sympathized with communism since fascism was equal to that according to their half‐baked analyses. Perhaps these anticommunists think that if they keep repetitively equating communism with fascism, no‐one will ever suspect them of sympathizing with the latter and then dig into their embarrassing histories? Who knows.

In any case, Mises’s ties to fascism did nothing to impede his career. Ronald Reagan, who has his own ties to fascism and neofascism, eulogized him four decades ago. Returning to page 6:

Subsequently, U.S. presidents and presidential hopefuls embraced the Austrian School of Economics. President Ronald Reagan (1984, 198) wrote:

von Mises […] rekindled the flames of liberty in new generations of thinkers […] we owe an incalculable debt to this dean of the Austrian school of economics for expanding our knowledge and inspiring a new vision of liberty in our age.

Of course, as we know looking at Timothy Snyder, Jordan Peterson & alia, anticommunist hacks don’t need to accomplish much to be praised to the high heavens by the rest of the upper classes. For example, Robert Leeson describes on pages 141–142 how ‘Mises had a tendency to make stark — and false — predictions’, and his alleged prediction of the Great Depression had nothing to do with the U.S. stock market at all. Hardly impressive.

If it weren’t enough that Mises was an Austrofascist hack, the way that he treated his lover and her young daughter was disturbing. Page 165:

According to Mises (1951 [1922], 87, 104, n1), ‘Waking and dreaming, man’s wishes turn upon sex.’ His fiancée (1976, 28, 23) recalled:

Sometimes I did not see him for weeks. But I knew very well that he was in town. At least twice daily the telephone rang, and when I answered there was silence at the other end of the line — not a word was spoken. I knew it was Lu […] I was so tormented, so torn to pieces that the children must have felt it.⁵⁴

Mises also gratified himself by feeling Margit’s six‐year‐old daughter: ‘I wanted to touch Gitta’s hair and think of you.’

While arguably no fault of Mises’s own, we should be unsurprised that an Austrofascist’s works would become popular in the Empire of Japan. Quoting Osamu Yanagisawa’s The impact of German economic thought on Japanese economists before World War II in The German Historical School: The Historical and Ethical Approach to Economics, page 179:

Accepting the opinion of Sombart and Schmalenbach on the development of capitalism, Mukai and Hon‐iden concluded that a reasonable future system would be a partly organized economy, somewhere between socialism and laissez‐faire capitalism. [sic]

On the other hand, they regarded socialism (perfect planning of the economy without money) as difficult and inhuman, paying special attention to the criticism of Ludwig von Mises, who had believed that a socialist system of planning, which lacked a market price system based on private ownership, could not work. Mukai (1933:276–86) summarized von Mises’s Kritik des Interventionismus (1929), which attracted many contemporary [Imperial] intellectuals.⁶

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

---

:::spoiler Click here for events that happened today (October 10). 1895: Wolfram Karl Ludwig Moritz Hermann Freiherr von Richthofen, Axis field marshal, was born.
1935: A parafascist coup d’état terminated Greece’s Second Hellenic Republic and replaced it with the Kingdom of Greece (again).
1938: Abiding by the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia completed its withdrawal from the Sudetenland, now property of the Third Reich.
1940: Berlin initiated the Führer‐Sofortprogramm, an emergency programme to build shelters for the Third Reich’s urban populations. Between 1824 and 1844 hours, eighteen shells from Axis guns at Calais struck Dover, then the Axis bombed London, Manchester, and various airfields overnight.
1941: Reinhard Heydrich ordered the town of Terezín (German: Theresienstadt) to be converted into a camp–ghetto for deported German, Austrian, and Czechoslovakian Jews. He placed Adolf Eichmann and Rolf Günther in charge of establishing this abomination. To make matters worse, the 1.Panzergruppe reached the Sea of Azov, and Axis Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau issued the ‘Severity Order’ in which he ordered the annihilation Bolshevism and the extermination of Jews.

Apart from that, the 250.Infanterie Division, also known as the Blue Division, entered service on the Eastern Front, and Berlin ordered a stop to night intruder operations over RAF airfields in eastern England; 1/NJG2 who have been conducting successful harrying of returning RAF bombers consequently transferred to the Mediterranean. Lastly, the 4th Panzer Division reached Mtsensk, Russia in Oryol Oblast, yet it would stay there for many days because of Soviet resistance.
1942: The major Axis air offensive against Malta commenced, the Third Reich increased rations by 10% for all foreign workers, and Sigmund Rascher reported from Dauchau his findings from experiments involving putting concentration camp prisoners in full flight suits and placing them in freezing conditions, concluding that the warming of the subjects’ heads and necks were vital for the subjects’ survival… on the bright side, Arnold Majewski, Axis cavalry officer, died immediately after receiving a bullet from a Soviet sniper.
1943: Franco ordered the 250th Spanish ‘Blue’ Division back to Spain from Wehrmacht service. A few thousand disobeyed this order and stayed behind, attached to either the 121.Infanterie Division or the Waffen‐SS.
1944: Armeegruppe E started its final retreat from Greece, and the Axis put down the antifascist rebellion in Slovakia.
1945: After Indonesian forces took control of much of Bandung, Java, nearby Axis forces, not having officially surrendered yet, counterattacked and took back the city, preventing the Indonesians from capturing a weapon factory.
1957: Karl August Genzken, Axis physician who committed numerous atrocities against concentration camp prisoners, was kind enough to drop dead. :::