Meals Matter by Michael Symons

Author:Michael Symons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Capitalism, or Else

One of Mises’s favorite techniques was to pose a stark choice—the alternatives were “apodictic and absolute” (1966, 196). The two options amounted to the price mechanism or total planning, to capitalism or war, to siding with money or being a soft-hearted, envious dupe. Mises then chose capitalism, and, since the world is complex, this required inconsistency. At one point, greed was a human universal: “Whereas in a capitalist society selfishness incites everyone to the utmost diligence, in a socialist society it makes for inertia and laxity” (677). Elsewhere, a committed communist bureaucrat might actually work hard to “court the favor of those in power” (274).

Little matched his hypocrisy about the state. He dismissed democracy and welfare and overlooked corporate reliance on government for planning, infrastructure, regulation, subsidies, correcting externalities, outsourcing, and so on. Instead, “considerable” taxes for the “government apparatus of courts, police officers, prisons, and of armed forces” were “fully compatible with the freedom the individual enjoys in a free market economy” (282).

In 1920 Mises set out the Austrian school’s often-quoted claim that a socialist commonwealth was unachievable because of the “economic calculation problem,” that is, the world’s complexity made central direction of “rational economic activity” impossible (1935, 130). As quoted earlier, Adam Smith (Wealth, 2.4.9) said sovereigns lacked the wisdom and knowledge to superintend the lives of ordinary people. Economics professor Max Weber (1968, 103) found a “planned economy” impossible unless some non-Market way were found to ascribe value. When “self-styled welfare economists” ignored complexity, Mises (1966, 834) suggested, they were trying to hide their “fallacies” behind a word (welfare) that might “disarm all opponents.” Society’s complicated task could be entrusted only to his alternative. Money did “all that we are entitled to ask of it—a guide amid the bewildering throng of economic possibilities” (1981, 100–1).

Mises toughed out internal contradictions for his own combative reasons. But why am I bothering? Not only have Mises’s ideas permeated recent thinking, but he pursued the antigastronomic ideals of neoclassical economics to the bitter end. In deploying key arguments, Mises demonstrated that economics had adapted to, and then advocated, corporate logic. Not that Mises accepted the existence of corporations.

Throughout, Mises remained committed to individual liberty. “Since time immemorial in the realm of Western civilization liberty has been considered as the most precious good.…‘Rugged’ individualism is the signature of our civilization” (1966, 284). This was no everyday individual, however—not marked by dignity, wisdom, compassion, nor that most self-centered of attributes, a healthy appetite.

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