Our main text for the Rothbard Graduate Seminar today is Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market: Government and the Economy, which contains an organized treatment of one location of economic theory, interventionism. This represents a departure from previous seminars in an important regard. Earlier workshops focused on texts by Mises or Rothbard that attended to a much wider scope of their idea. Previous seminar texts such as Man, Economy, and State and Human Action cover the totality of economic theory. Human Action, in addition, includes a full treatment of method in addition to discussions of epistemology, political approach, and economic history. Other texts used at earlier Rothbard Graduate Seminars such as The Ethics of Liberty and Economic Controversies are also broad in scope, containing, respectively, Rothbard’s organized discussion of his political philosophy and a broad spectrum of his essays on theoretical and applied economics.
Today’s RGS deliberately focuses on the much narrower subject of interventionism, due to the fact that it is the financial program of progressivism, the prevailing ideology of the twenty-first century. Progressivism attained this position after a leftist “long march” through Western educational, cultural, spiritual, economic, and political organizations, which started soon after World War II, gained momentum during the 1960s, and quickly sped up in the 1980s. In a prescient memo composed shortly after the war, Ludwig von Mises explained that the essence of the progressive policy agenda is interventionism. Mises called the mentors of progressives, “a garbled mix of scuba divers particles of heterogeneous teachings incompatible with one another.” He consisted of Marxism, British Fabianism, and the Prussian historic school in this doctrinal witch’s brew. Whatever the differences among them, nevertheless, all progressives were passionately joined on 2 points. First, they believed that “contradictions and evils are … inherent in commercialism.” And second, they argued that the only method to root out the inequities and impracticalities of commercialism and transform it into a more gentle and logical system was by enforcing the program of interventionism laid out by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. As Mises explained, “the Communist Manifesto is for [progressives] both handbook and holy writ, the only trusted source of details about mankind’s future along with the ultimate code of political conduct.”
To be clear, the gradualist, interventionist course to socialism laid out in The Communist Manifesto was explicitly rejected in the later writings of Marx as “petty-bourgeois nonsense.” The later Marx advocated allowing the conditions of transformation to ripen until the continuing immiseration of the employees, getting worse economic crises, and concentration of capital in fewer and less hands triggered the proletariat to rise and ruin the capitalist system in one mighty blow. Although welcoming Marx’s ultimate goal, progressives hence differ from full-blooded Marxists in picking the nonviolent, gradualist path toward socialism via interventionism, the mixed economy, democratic socialism, or whatever you want to call it. Some progressives view interventionism as an approach of subverting industrialism and accomplishing complete socialist main preparation. Others– most likely the bulk today– see interventionism as the ways for taming and humanizing capitalism and seek to foist it on the productive class of employees and business owners as “an irreversible system of society’s financial organization.” However the difference in between these 2 variations is beside the point. No matter the exact long-run goal of their supporters, interventionist policies have the same effects. They distort market prices, misallocate resources, suppress and misdirect entrepreneurship, destabilize the economy, and rearrange earnings from the producers to the parasitic judgment elites and their constituencies and cronies.
Why have I called out progressives in particular when there are lots of political ideologies that advocate interventionism? There are 2 factors for doing so. First, as Murray Rothbard has mentioned, a method aimed at bring back liberty in the real world “should fuse together the abstract and the concrete; it should not just assault elites in the abstract, however need to focus specifically on the existing statist system, on those who today constitute the ruling classes.” And, right now, as I discussed above, progressivism is the dominating ideology of our age. It permeates the thinking of our gentility while providing intellectual cover for their looting and injustice of the producers. Hence, we can not be satisfied with simply an abstract financial analysis that explain the huge selection of inadequacies, misallocations, and monopoly and inflationary gains and losses that interventionism imposes on a theoretical economy. If financial theory is to be more than a parlor game, then it needs to be used as a weapon in the war to defend and advance liberty. We should use both financial reality and historical insight to expose the concrete groups that benefit from specific, real-world interventions and to awaken the much bigger group of producers to their victimization by these interventions.
This brings me to the 2nd reason for highlighting the relationship in between interventionism and the ideology of progressivism. For progressivism is even more than a financial program for the here and now. The core belief of progressives is the misconception that history is an inescapable progress toward an egalitarian socialist state. Unlike traditional Marxists, however, progressives think that history unfolds not through class battle and bloody transformation but through the unrelenting march of democracy. An additional departure from orthodox Marxism, as Rothbard mentions, is that modern progressives have come to “realize that it is far better for the socialist State to retain the capitalists and a truncated market economy, to be regulated, restricted, controlled, and based on the commands of the State.” The progressive vision is “not ‘class war’ however a type of ‘class consistency,’in which the capitalists and market are required to work and servant for the good of ‘society’ and of the parasitic State apparatus.”
In spite of these superficial variances, progressives are Marxist to the core since they fervently believe in the Enlightenment myth of unavoidable development toward a perfect society. For that reason, as Rothbard mentions, progressivism is “‘religious beliefs’ in the inmost sense, held on faith: the view that the unavoidable goal of history is an ideal world, an egalitarian socialist world, a Kingdom of God in the world.” And due to the fact that progressivism is a religion, it will take what Rothbard calls a “religious war” to combat and defeat it at last. Not only must the war versus progressivism be combated with a religious fervor, however it must also be, in Rothbard’s words, “openly and gloriously reactionary.” In other words, it needs to target at taking back or recuperating what has been stolen. The oppressed and made use of will not storm the barriers to reclaim “liberty” or the “free market” in the abstract, but they will fight to recuperate the visible, concrete fruits of liberty and a totally free economy. They want their schools, films, workplaces, and city downtowns back. The war of response must, therefore, include a broad-based and unrelenting attack on all progressive teachings, not only financial and political but likewise cultural, academic, religious, linguistic, healing, biological, and so on. All political and social standards and taboos inflicted on society by progressives should be ruthlessly exposed and ridiculed, and mercilessly crushed. The leftist long march through organizations should not just be reversed however developed into a full-on rout. The Fantastic Reaction should totally displace the Great Reset and cast progressivism into the dustbin of history.
To conclude, in the war versus progressivism, the theory of interventionism has an essential role to play because, at bottom, it is the theory of who is swindling whom, who is being enriched and who is impoverished by government policies. When combined with historical insight, the theory can pierce through the “false awareness” of the productive classes that has actually been produced by progressive ideology. It can open their eyes to the reality that they– the majority of society– are being duped and plundered by a ruling elite who is utilizing its ill-gotten gains to control and oppress them and debase and ruin their valued social organizations.
This address was offered to the 2022 Rothbard Graduate Workshop.