In highlighting what they see as the excesses of capitalism, the strategy of many progressives is to slander capitalists as terrible human beings. Their message is that capitalism is bad because capitalists are racists, fascists, and Nazis. For example, the socialist Quinn Slobodian described Murray Rothbard as a “racist.”
To substantiate this claim, he set out selected quotations from Rothbard in which it appears that Rothbard is indeed expressing racist opinions, but which—when read in context—clearly show that Rothbard’s argument was, in fact, as David Gordon explains, “exactly the opposite of the view that Slobodian imputes to him.” Slobodian also depicted Rothbard as a supporter of slavery, carefully neglecting to inform his readers that Rothbard strongly opposed slavery in his Ethics of Liberty and many other writings. Similarly, Slobodian depicted Ludwig von Mises as a racist and imperialist, again by selective quotations in which, once again, “Mises is saying just the opposite of what Slobodian attributes to him.” As Phil Magness explains, this strategy—claiming that a writer argued the opposite of what he in fact meant by means of selective quotation—is a habit of Slobodian’s:
How, exactly, had Slobodian discerned a parenthetical opening in Mises’s works for the very concepts and positions that Mises condemned?
It did not take long to find an answer to that question. In both articles, Slobodian displayed a habit of misrepresenting excerpted passages from Mises’s works by either omitting directly pertinent context from surrounding passages or, in some instances, directly removing content from the quotes themselves to change their meaning. In each case, the edits made Mises’s words appear sympathetic, or at least open to, to a variety of racist and imperialist beliefs, when in fact he was condemning them.
In an excerpt titled “Ludwig von Mises and the ‘Critical Race Theory’ of Neoliberalism,” which is extracted from his book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness, Thom Hartmann adopts a very similar strategy to Slobodian’s, in order to support his allegations that Mises promoted Hitler’s racial ideas. He says,
Mises suffered the indignity of Hitler’s gestapo rummaging through his apartment in March of 1938, seizing 21 boxes of his papers and taking over his apartment. Two years later, Mises fled to the United States, where, ironically, he advocated many of Hitler’s racial ideas and even integrated them into his economic ideology.
To substantiate this claim, Hartmann employs the same habit as Slobodian by producing a stream of quotations, removed from their context and with the footnote references missing from the excerpt which makes it more difficult for readers to check the context without buying Hartmann’s book. As presented, the quotations leave readers with the impression that Mises is endorsing arguments that he was in fact rejecting. For example, in his book Socialism Mises rejects the analysis of the “race scientist” Gobineau, arguing that Gobineau’s “arbitrary and contradictory hypotheses are utterly without foundation and have been pooh poohed as empty chimeras.” Yet, in his book, Hartmann falsely presents Gobineau’s opinions as the opinions of Mises—he attributes to Mises the very arguments Mises was rejecting. Hartmann writes:
Mises preached that it was the obligation of the superior races of Europe to, essentially, civilize inferior races all around the world, while retaining their own racial purity. The intelligence and abilities of people weren’t found in how they grew up; it was all in their genes. We’re born how we are, he believed, not made that way by our life’s experiences.
“The influence of environment is estimated to be low:” he wrote, “mixture of races creates bastards, in whom the good hereditary qualities of the nobler races deteriorate or are lost.… [C]ertain influences, operating over a long period, have bred one race or several, with specially favourable qualities, and the members of these races had by means of these advantages obtained so long a lead that members of other races could not overtake them within a limited time.”
Hartmann gives the impression that he is merely quoting Mises—but here Mises was referring to the “empty chimeras” of the “race expert” Gobineau. It was Gobineau—the self-styled race expert—who “preached” what Hartmann falsely claims Mises “preached,” namely, that everything is determined by race, that environment is irrelevant, and that “mixture of races” leads to bad economic outcomes. Mises rejected this supposed “race science” as incompatible with his own argument concerning the universality of economic science. The truth is the opposite of what Hartmann claims—Mises was arguing that Gobineau’s race theories, even if revised later as race science develops, tell us nothing about the science of economics. Mises did not claim to know everything there is to know about race, and he acknowledged that he could not summarily rule out the possibility that further advances in science may cast matters in a different light. His point was that the science of economics is not based on race—a point which went over Hartmann’s head not because he is unable to understand what he reads but because, in his rush to paint Mises as a disciple of Hitler, he did not bother to read Mises carefully. Later in the same book, Mises decisively rejects Gobineau’s race theories:
The race theories of Gobineau and many others originated in the resentment of a defeated military and noble caste against bourgeois democracy and capitalist economy. For use in the daily politics of modern Imperialism they have taken a form which re-embodies old theories of violence and war. But their critical strictures are applicable only to the catchwords of the old natural law philosophy. They are irrelevant so far as Liberalism is concerned. Even the race theory cannot shake the assertion that civilization is a work of peaceful co-operation.
To readers who know the truth about Mises and Rothbard, dishonest allegations derived by imputing to them opinions they did not hold, may seem hardly worth refuting because they are so patently false. As David Gordon has asked, “Why should we care about Slobodian’s mistakes?” Indeed, why should we care if Hartmann falsely claims Mises advanced Hitler’s ideas? After all, these types of claims—allegations that everyone who rejects progressive egalitarian ideologies is a Nazi—are so childish that surely anyone who has the slightest interest in understanding economic theories would simply ignore them and regard such authors as people who do not deserve to be taken seriously. Further, debating with everyone who calls capitalists racists and fascists would be a full-time occupation—indeed, as I have previously explained in criticizing the “decolonize the curriculum” movement, subversive Neo-Marxists would be delighted if all academic disciplines were henceforth devoted entirely to debating racism, who is Hitler, etc. If they can occupy everyone in debating critical race theories, nobody will have any spare time to campaign to End the Fed, and that would be a great outcome for the commies! In any case, as I observed in a previous article on this subject, allegations of racism are, in practice, unfalsifiable because—in this post-truth world—denying such allegations is taken as proof that the allegations are true:
By now Slobodian’s reasoning should be clear: as he sees it, everyone who rejects his socialistic worldview is racist, and any arguments they may present are just a façade to disguise their true motivations. He relies on what is essentially a Kafka trap: disagreeing with “liberal democracy” is proof that you are a racist, and denying that is further proof that you are indeed a racist—why else would you deny being a racist? In this Kafkaesque world, denying being racist is exactly what we expect racists to do.
To illustrate how this works, it may be helpful to consider in more detail some of the claims made by Hartmann. To substantiate his claim that Mises “advocated many of Hitler’s racial ideas,” Hartmann quotes Mises’s remark that “the destiny of modern civilization as developed by the white peoples in the last two hundred years is inseparably linked with the fate of economic science.” As I have argued in a previous article, in this quotation Mises was not claiming that economic science works because it is inseparably linked to white people, nor that economic science only works if it is linked to white people—Mises was arguing that Western civilization is inseparably linked to sound economics. Once again, Hartmann takes Mises to mean the opposite of what he is arguing—Mises is arguing that if economics only worked when white people do it, it would not be a science. It would, at best, be a cultural trait of white people exactly as critical race theorists and other polylogists claim when they assert that economics is “whiteness.” Mises was, of course, not saying polylogism is correct, nor was he agreeing with the Nazis that logic varies based on race—he was saying the precise opposite. He was rejecting polylogism. As I explained in a previous article on polylogism:
Mises’s goal in Human Action was to explain the science of economics as a universal science. Hence, he rejected the previously prevailing notion that principles of economics vary from one person or one group to another, and that “its teachings are valid only for the capitalist system of the short-lived and already vanished liberal period of Western civilization.” He aimed to explain economic principles not as true in a specific time for a specific group of people, but “a regularity of phenomena to which man must adjust his action if he wishes to succeed.” These principles apply to all human beings, of all races, at all times.
Hartmann, like Slobodian, also selects a series of quotations from Mises on the subject of fascism, all of which make the same error that David Gordon, Ralph Raico, Jeffrey Tucker, and Phil Magness have roundly debunked. But Slobodian and Hartmann are not the only socialists to have fallen into this trap, in their eagerness to hunt for any fascism that may be lurking in capitalist literature. As this quotation by Mises is often taken out of context, it may be worth asking why Mises described Western civilization in this way, namely “modern civilization as developed by the white peoples in the last two hundred years.” In his introduction to Human Action, his great treatise on economics, Mises was responding to the criticism that economics is not a “science” because it is not universal and does not follow the methodology of the sciences. To understand the context of his remarks it is necessary to read the preceding paragraphs in which he defended economic science from the claim that Western civilization is the result of technological and industrial advancements to which economic science has no causal connection and nothing to contribute. The critics had claimed that civilization is attributable to the natural sciences—biology, chemistry, physics, etc.—and that by comparison, economic science is “backward” and of little or no benefit to the march of social progress:
There are on the one hand some naturalists and physicists who censure economics for not being a natural science and not applying the methods and procedures of the laboratory… Then there are people who assert that something must be wrong with the social sciences because social conditions are unsatisfactory.
Mises defended economic science by pointing out that sound economics is inextricably connected to the very advancements of civilization that these critics praise. He explains:
These grumblers do not realize that the tremendous progress of technological methods of production and the resulting increase in wealth and welfare were feasible only through the pursuit of those liberal policies which were the practical application of the teachings of economics. It was the ideas of the classical economists that removed the checks imposed by age-old laws, customs, and prejudices upon technological improvement and freed the genius of reformers and innovators from the straitjackets of the guilds, government tutelage, and social pressure of various kinds. It was they that reduced the prestige of conquerors and expropriators and demonstrated the social benefits derived from business activity. None of the great modern inventions would have been put to use if the mentality of the pre-capitalistic era had not been thoroughly demolished by the economists.
It should be clear from that context that the discussion concerned advances in Western civilization and the central role of economic science in making these advances possible. Mises was not arguing that the advances were only possible because Westerners are white peoples, but that the advances of Westerners (we shall address later the point about Westerners being white) are possible because of sound economics. The grumblers claimed that economics is just a set of opinions or idiosyncratic ideologies and beliefs that vary based on culture, race, sex, class-consciousness, psychology, historical conditions, and the like. This claim was part of a broader “revolt against economics” that Mises was addressing. After all, if economic principles are just a bourgeois affectation, then nobody would feel the need to study them. Mises explains:
The economic policies of the last decades have been the outcome of a mentality that scoffs at any variety of sound economic theory and glorifies the spurious doctrines of its detractors. What is called “orthodox” economics is in most countries barred from the universities and is virtually unknown to the leading statesmen, politicians, and writers.
Mises then warned that if Western civilization abandons sound economics, it will fall. He urged the West not to reject economic thinking, a warning which we would all do well to heed:
It must be emphasized that the destiny of modern civilization as developed by the white peoples in the last two hundred years is inseparably linked with the fate of economic science. This civilization was able to spring into existence because the peoples were dominated by ideas which were the application of the teachings of economics to the problems of economic policy. It will and must perish if the nations continue to pursue the course which they entered upon under the spell of doctrines rejecting economic thinking.
Now, finally, to the question why he bothered to describe Western people as “white peoples.” After all, he could have referred to “modern civilization” without saying “as developed by the white peoples in the last two hundred years,” as it seems it is this reference to “the white peoples” that caused Hartmann to get overexcited and believe he had unearthed a fascist. To respond to this question, we can do no better than remind Hartmann that the European peoples were, and are, in fact, white. It’s okay to be white! Same as it’s okay to be black or any other race one may be. Perhaps Hartmann would prefer that this fact should not be pointed out, as drawing attention to the race of European peoples might be offensive to people who are not white? Other races might feel excluded. When we refer to industrialization we should perhaps not mention white people, to avoid upsetting Mr. and Mrs. Hurt Feelings.
But, with all due respect to those who hold such childish opinions, the fact that their feelings are hurt, and they now feel “harmed” (or so they claim), does not amount to evidence that anyone who mentions the history of white peoples is “literally Hitler.” By establishing this edict—issuing a decree that if you mention white people that proves you are a fascist—progressives attempt to secure the triumph of their own political ideology by the simple expedient of silencing their opponents. By this standard, the only way to avoid being accused of promoting Hitler’s ideas is either to fall in line with the progressive agenda or to forever remain silent.
This was not Mises’s way. As I explained in a previous article, he did not pretend that there is no such thing as race. Nor did he regard it as necessary to avoid telling the truth for fear of hurting anyone’s precious feelings. On the contrary, as expressed in the words of his motto: tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito (Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it).
