The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Ludwig von Mises)

I felt like a needed a little background before getting into my Hayek books, and according to Russ Roberts, Mises was a big influence.  I don't think I'm up for academic tracts, though, so this was a relatively short sample (picked basically at random out of what was available in the library) of what I can expect from popular economics.

At first, I didn't appreciate Mises' hectoring tone, scolding the unsuccessful for their jealousy of the rich.  I mean, even if he's right, he doesn't have to say it like that.  But I realized throughout the book that Mises felt that tone was necessary to wake up his audience to the damage that could be done by the enemies of capitalism.  If he was writing this in the 70's, he was writing in a crisis moment.  There was no time for gladhanding the naysayers.  It was buck up the capitalists, or perish.

Bullet points I picked up on throughout the book:

• The consumer is ultimate sovereign.  If the public won't buy your product, your business will fail.  Economic growth (not to say success or moral goodness) only comes from serving the fulfilling the public's desire.
• The players that produce real progress are the saver who provides capital, the entrepreneur who attempts to create a product to sell to the masses, and the technologist who invents means of greater efficiency.  All other participants are bit players, essentially interchangeable parts.  Resentment at recognizing this leads to the anti-capitalist mentality, even as the successes of the progress-makers ("progressive classes") improve the lives of all (as witnessed by their eager consumption of those goods).
• SAVING is the primary act.  Growth can't come intially from spending, or from boosting demand as the first step in the chain (although all these actions are cyclically related to each other).  But saving is primary-- it gives the essential "slack" (my word) necessary to attempt something new, the success of which is the basis for real economic growth.
• Capitalism is accused of debasing the culture-- by flooding the market with trash literature, it crowds out real art and real profundity.  Poppycock.  Goodness and badness in art is independent of commercial success.  Commercial participation in the arts in no way precludes the possibility of great art.  Capitalistic participation merely indicates a desire of the public that was previously unmet-- THEY determine what sells.  And in prior days, profound art was unavailable for public consumption anyway, no less so than today.  Existence in a capitalistic society in no way precludes the pursuit of great art, if that is what the artist wants from his life.
• Capitalism and communism-- identical to socialism-- are diametrically opposed.  There is no middle ground, no waystation, in interventionism-- it is only a step toward communism.  The founders of communism certainly saw it that way.
• Anti-capitalist literature depends almost fully on a misrepresentation of the conditions of people-- both the poor it tries to inspire to rise up, and of the businessmen it accuses of unadulterated treachery.  It is silly not to recognize this as it is happening.
• Mises goes into a severe criticism of the concept of natural rights-- though it's not clear if he would disagree with Locke's concept of natural rights or the Founders' concept.  His main point seems to be only that there is no natural right to an even share in the  goods or the wealth within the society-- for where did that wealth arise from to begin with?  Only through the tortured application of reason and ingenuity on the part of human actors.  Nature provides nothing.  This is an argument against the concept of a natural right to freedom from material want as put forward by the early 20th century Progressives.
• Increased efficiency (either through improved technology or entrepreneurial insight) raises the marginal value of the labor employed in the process (possibly because it gets by with a lower total amount of it?).  That increase in value corresponds to rising wages within that industry.  In turn, this raises the wages of labor throughout society, for employers must pay more to prevent employees from leaving to enter the improved industry.  This is all possible system-wide essentially because of the gradual accumulation of capital-- that is, through the saving made possible by the increased efficiency.  And saving is sustainable only because useful production outpaces consumption-- and that happens through the application of human ingenuity.
• Me : Is this the ultimate argument against centrally planned economy?  A government CANNOT save; it will always insist on distributing for consumption ALL of its production.  Even a longer-term plan on the part of the government will have the eventual future consumption locked into law, undeferrable.  Capitalism, and the progress it generates, requires private property rights and private control of the means of production, because only a private actor can accumulate capital by saving-- by foregoing consumption-- in the first place.  Only a private actor can plan ahead and recognize an opportunity for future benefit through delayed gratification.
• The ultimate source of this idea is the concept of individual liberty first proposed by the Greeks (flawed as their concept was).  The modern capitalist age drew explicitly on the cultural tradition first laid down by the Greeks.  The actions of this century's perverted liberals-- adopting a sort of "super-liberalism" (Mises' word) that sought the emancipation of all people from the vicissitudes of Nature and of inequality (not recognizing how that inequality arose)-- first sought to overturn the primacy of the ancient cultural tradition from the public mind.  This is a complete reversal of real liberty.
• p. 101: "Freedom under capitalism means: not to depend more on other people's discretion than these others depend on one's own."  We ourselves make the rich rich by buying their products.  In turn we gain the benefits of the improvements they try to sell.  Everyone is reliant upon everyone else-- but everyone has skin and a say in the game as well.  What more do we want?
• The hectoring of the intellectual class, through their freedom to express their views, is the price we pay to secure the freedom required for the capitalists to do their thing without government interference.  What it requires in turn is vigilance, and active argument in support of our own point of view.

Wow.  I got a lot more out of this than I expected.  On to Hayek!