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Supporters of Capitalism Are Crazy, 
Says Harvard  Get articles and news in your inbox
Mises Daily: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Browse the Daily 
Last weekend, Harvard University sponsored a
Gallery View of Mises Daily Articles
conference called (I am not making this up) "The Free
List View of Mises Daily Articles
Market Mindset: History, Psychology, and
All Mises Daily Authors
Consequences." Its purpose was to try to figure out why,
since everyone knows the current crisis amounts to a
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failure of the market economy, the stupid rubes
continue to believe in it. The promotional literature for
the conference opened with That Quotation from Alan Ludwig von Mises 
Greenspan — the one in which he suggested that there Institute  on 
Facebook
was, after all, a "flaw" in the free market he hadn't
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noticed before.

Well, that does it, then! If our Soviet commissar in 44,326 people like Ludwig von 


Mises Institute .
charge of money and interest rates says the free market
doesn't work, who are you to disagree?

The promotional material continues: Charles Darrell Pawel

"The Therapist" (1937) by Rene Magritte Facebook social plugin  


If the current state of the U.S. economy makes clear
that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's faith in free markets was misplaced,
the question remains: what was it about free markets that proved — and still continues to
prove — so alluring to economists, scholars, and policy‐makers alike? About the Author 
Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Because, of course, if there's one guiding principle behind the largest government in world history,
Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
it's free markets. Ahem. (visit his website) is a
senior fellow at the Mises
This conference, we were told, Institute, where he will
be teaching "Nullification:
A Jeffersonian Bulwark
Against Tyranny" this fall
brings together leading scholars in law, economics, social psychology, and social cognition
at the Mises Academy. He
to present and discuss their research regarding the historical origins, psychological is the author of the New York Times bestseller
antecedents, and policy consequences of the free market mindset. Their work illustrates Meltdown: A Free‐Market Look at Why the Stock
that the magic of the marketplace is partially an illusion based on faulty assumptions and Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and
outmoded approaches. Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse.
His other recent books include 33 Questions
About American History You're Not Supposed to
Ask, The Church and the Market: A Catholic
The speakers then spent the day, I am sure, laying out their own faulty assumptions and outmoded
Defense of the Free Economy, Nullification, and
approaches, and studiously ignoring the Austrian School of economics The Politically Incorrect Guide to American
History (a New York Times bestseller). Send him
In short, the conference was about this:Why do people still think the interaction of free mail.
view archives
individuals is a superior economic system to one directed by Harvard Ph.D.s like us? I mean, apart
from the failure of central planning in every case in which it's been tried, a failure so staggering
Related 
that only a blockhead could miss it, why would people cling to the idea that being herded into a
collective run by the experts isn't the best way to live DailyArticle: Legalize Drunk Driving

So by assuming from the outset the very thing that needs to be proven— namely, that the current Content: The End or the Beginning of History

state of the economy just occurred spontaneously, as the result of wicked market forces— our
Content: Epistemological Problems, Economics and
betters relieve themselves of the need to consider that central banking, a governmen ‐established
Technology
institution, just might have had, you know, a little something to do with what happened
Content: "Classical Economics vs. the Exploitation
Theory"
George Reisman has alreadydemonstrated the absurdity of referring to our present system as a
"fre ‐market" one. Naturally, of course, none of the participants bothered to notice that a Soviet PDF: The Political Economy of William Graham Sumner: A
Study in the History of Free ‐Enterprise Ideas
commissar in charge of money and interest rates amounts to something like the opposite of the free
market, or that the economic distortions he causes cannot, therefore, be the fault of the free
Content: "Wage Earner Against the Estate Tax"
market. This is exactly why, in my bookMeltdown, I call the Fed "the elephant in the living room."
We're not supposed to notice it, and we're supposed to pretend the damage it causes is the result o
PDF: "Ludwig von Mises and the Case for Gold"
wildcat capitalism, unfettered free markets, or whatever other juvenile phrase is currently in vogue
to describe the usual bogeyman
DailyArticle: In Defense of Rothbard

Now I don't want to list all the paper topics at this conference, since it'd be a shame to make all of
DailyArticle: In Defense of Rothbard
you feel stupid for having frittered away your weekend when you could have listened to, say,
Stephen Marglin's paper on "How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community." Nowthere's a DailyArticle: Is Private Enterprise Predatory?
topic I haven't heard quite enough platitudes about. (If you must, you can view the whole schedule
her .) You could also have heard a bunch of totally conventional polemics about how the market Content: The Austrian School and Spontaneous Order:
economy allows for "too much" pollution, when in fact a genuine free market— which, I need hardly Comment on O'Driscoll

point out, is not actually considered in any of these alleged papers— would punish polluters and Content: The Ethics of Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard

bring about the internalization of s ‐called externalities. Murray Rothbard dealt with this matter in
anextremely important article none of the participants had read. Content: Chapter 12—The Economics of Violent
Intervention in the Market (continued)

I wonder if anyone at the conference asked questions like these


Product: Anti‐Capitalistic Mentality, The

When Greenspan flooded the economy with newly created money and brought interest
Product: Ludwig von Mises: An Annotated Bibliography
rates down to destructively low levels, thereby distorting entrepreneurial calculation as well
as consumers' home‐purchasing decisions, was that the fault of the free market? Product: Resurrecting Marx

Do you think the Fed's creation of cheap credit out of thin air makes market participants Product: Shorter Classics
more careful or less careful in how they allocate borrowed funds?
: A Webb of Lies
When Alan Greenspan bailed out Long Term Capital Management in 1998, was that a "free
market" phenomenon? Do you think he thereby encouraged more or less risk taking among : Before Resorting to Politics
other major market actors?
: The Pinkback
The Financial Times spoke in 2000, in the wake of the dot‐com boom, of an increasing
concern that the so‐called "Greenspan put" was injecting into the economy "a destructive : Waiting for a Tax Cut
tendency toward excessively risky investment supported by hopes that the Fed will help if
things go bad." "All the insane dot‐com investment we've seen, all this destruction of
capital, all the crazy excesses of the past few years wouldn't have happened without the
easy credit accommodated by the Fed," added financial consultant Michael Belkin. Did the
free market cause that? Mises Community  mises blog rss

Mises Blog User Blogs Forums


Do lending standards decline for no particular reason, or could this phenomenon have a
teensy weensy bit to do with (a) government regulation aimed at increasing Is the Price of Content Approaching
Zero?
"homeownership" and (b) loose monetary policy by the Fed? (When the banks get the
2/14/2011 6:01:33 PM by Douglas French
additional reserves the Fed creates, they naturally want to lend it out — and in order to do
It's Not Just the Sand States Anymore
so, they wind up lending it to people they either have or would have rejected previously.
2/14/2011 4:53:28 PM by Douglas French
As I show in Meltdown, the phenomenon of lax lending standards in the wake of an
inflationary boom by a central bank is traceable all the way to the 19th century. There is Powell on Immigration in Denver
2/14/2011 3:13:56 PM by John Cochran
nothing even slightly unexpected — or market‐driven — about it.)
Nina Paley on This Week in Law: Problems
with Copyright
Questions like these could go on and on. Not one, you can be certain, was raised at this conference
2/14/2011 1:03:35 PM by Stephan Kinsella

Tom Woods and Art Carden: Upcoming


Now if you really wanted to sponsor an event whose purpose was to try to understand why people Mises Academy Courses
believe inane things that have been falsified by reality, you'd do much better to hold a conference 2/14/2011 9:27:31 AM by Danny Sanchez
on socialism, or on Keynes and his school. It would be fascinating to learn the psychological The Egyptian Crisis and Libertarian Class‐
motivation behind the persistence of Keynesian economics, whose popular version is a Conflict Theory
nonfalsifiable, ersatz religion. 2/14/2011 7:03:50 AM by Mises Daily
view all…

Is Japan's economy still suffering? Why, that's because Japan didn't spend enough— even though it
spent so much that it became the most indebted country in the developed world.
Literature  rss

Have people spent so much that they're now burdened with debt they can't possibly repay? Then we
The Origins of the Federal Reserve
need more spending. by Murray N. Rothbard
The Theory of Idle Resources
Is the economy a distorted mess after an artificial boom? Then instead of letting the economy
by William H. Hutt
restructure itself along sustainable lines, let's instead "stimulate" the system just as it is, with the
The American Mercury November 1936
goal of bringing about more "consumption," more "labor" employed, and higher "income," without
by American Mercury
bothering to disaggregate any of these things and decidingwhat kinds of labor need to go where,
The American Mercury October 1937
what kind of consumption are sustainable and what are figments of the bubble economy, or how
by American Mercury
the capital structure needs to be reassembled in order to cater to genuine consumer demand. In
The American Mercury August 1939
fact, let's actually boast about neglecting capital theory altogether (as indeed Keynes did in a 1937
by American Mercury
article in theQuarterly Journal of Economics).
The American Mercury June 1939
by American Mercury
Here's another thought: given how many Keynesian economists predicted a return to depression
view all…
conditions when World War II spending came to an end, and that what we instead got wasthe single
most robust year the private economy has ever see , isn't it a little strange that not one of these
economists went back and reexamined his premises
Upcoming Events  rss

On the other hand, consider the names Jim Grant, Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, and Jim Rogers. Apart fro
having predicted the current crisis— unlike anyone at the Harvard conference and indeed unlike the
pape‐tiger economists they unsurprisingly preferred to spar with during their deep‐thinking session
last weekend— one thing these men have in common is that they are all Austrian economists, they
all believe in the Austrian theory of the business cycle, and they all pin the blame for the crisis on
the Fed, a nonmarket institution. These men believe in thereal free market, not the centrally
planned market of Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and the Federal Reserve. And they saw a crisis
coming at a time when everyone else was predicting new highs for the Dow and singing the praises
of a world economy that was more robust than it had ever been

Maybe that's why people believe in market economics: unlike the Rube Goldberg models of their
counterparts in the profession, the things Austrian economists write and say actually have some
connection to the real world

People who believe in the market economy support a social


order in which free individuals make voluntary contracts
with each other, and no one can initiate physical force
against anyone else. Is that vision so obviously unattractive
that we have to refer its supporters for psychological
evaluation?

We might instead wonder at the psychological condition of view all…


those who would denounce such a system: might they be
motivated, for all their noble talk, by nothing but base envy
of those with more material wealth than they, or by a The Quotable Mises 
pathological desire to dominate other people

I'm sure that will be covered at next year's conference

$29 $21

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (visit hiswebsite) is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, where he will be teaching
"Nullification: A Jeffersonian Bulwark Against Tyranny" this fall at theMises Academy. He is the author of the New
York Time bestseller Meltdown: A Free‐Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and
Government Bailouts Will Make Things Wors . His other recent books include 33 Questions About American History
You're Not Supposed to As , The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, Nullification, and
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American Histor (a New York Times bestseller). Send him mail. See his article
archive. Comment on the blog.
You can subscribe to future articles by this author via thisRSS feed.
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l The Origins of the Federal Reserve by  l Daniel Bernoulli and the Founding of  l How 'Mainstream' Economics Miseducates 


Murray N. Rothbard  Mathematical Economics by Murray N.  About Money and the Fed by Thomas J. 
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Selgin 
The American Mercury June 1939 by  N. Rothbard 
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l The New Deal: History, Economics, and 
American Mercury  l Libertarian Science Fiction by Jeff 
Riggenbach  Law by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. 
l An Interview with Thomas E. Woods, Jr. by 
Thomas E. Woods, Jr. 

"The sacrifice that is demanded of the soldier serving by compulsion can be compensated 
only with intangible values, never with material ones."
— Ludwig von Mises, in Nation, State, and Economy 

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