Good Plan Means My Plan

"All this passionate praise of the supereminence of government action is but a poor disguise for the individual interventionist’s self-deification. The great god State is a great god only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of interventionism wants to see achieved. Only that plan is genuine which the individual planner fully approves. All other plans are simply counterfeit. In saying 'plan' what the author of a book on the benefits of planning has in mind is, of course, his own plan alone. He does not take into account the possibility that the plan which the government puts into practice may differ from his own plan. The various planners agree only with regard to their rejection of laissez faire, i.e., the individuals’ discretion to choose and to act. They entirely disagree with regard to the choice of the unique plan to be adopted. To every exposure of the manifest and incontestable defects of interventionist policies the champions of interventionism react in the same way. These faults, they say, were the results of spurious interventionism; what we are advocating is good interventionism, not bad interventionism. And, of course, good interventionism is the professor’s own brand.

"Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force him to yield to a dictator."

—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

TGIF: Intervention Begets Intervention

This week's TGIF looks at Ludwig von Mises's "critique of interventionism." Bottom line:

Is there a lesson to be drawn from Mises’s critique? I think so. Intervention tends to beget intervention. Therefore, when you see a public problem, don’t look to government intervention for a solution. Instead, look for the previous intervention that created it — and work to have the offending legislation repealed.

Read it here.

TGIF: No Laissez Faire There

What’s often unappreciated is that writers sympathetic to the free market have disparaged the Gilded Age as broadly illiberal and contrary to the spirit of free enterprise.

Read TGIF here.

The Robber Barons

I'm finally reading Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons, a book I never felt I needed to read. That was a bad decision. I'm only a couple of chapters in, but I can tell this is a book worth reading because it will shed some needed light on the alleged golden era of laissez faire, roughly 1865-1890. Here's yet another case where libertarian revisionist history needs to be revised. So far it confirms a suspicion that has grown on me only recently (I must confess): Much of what went on in that era appears to have been the fruit of the poisonous tree, namely, Civil War contracting and currency speculation. Civil War is the health of the State and privileged partners in the business world. This was capitalism as it played out historically -- but it was not the free market.

By the way, the 1962 reprint I found has a blurb on the back by none other than Henry Hazlitt, who reviewed the book in the New York Times Book Review. Hazlitt wrote that Josephson "is particularly to be congratulated upon the lucidity with which he sets forth the complex financial transactions and the uncanny legerdemain by which most of the barons built up their fortunes." Did Hazlitt know something Ayn Rand did not?

More to come as I make my way through the book.