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Thread: Mises on Nationalism, the Right of Self-Determination, and the Problem of Immigration

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    Mises on Nationalism, the Right of Self-Determination, and the Problem of Immigration

    I don't 100% agree but I mostly do.

    https://mises.org/blog/mises-nationa...em-immigration

    03/28/2017Joseph T. Salerno

    In the current discussion about immigration, Ludwig von Mises is often invoked by libertarians as a staunch proponent of free trade in the broad sense that pertains to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. Mises has even been proclaimed by some libertarians as an advocate of open borders. However, Mises’s views on the free migration of labor across existing political borders were carefully nuanced and informed by political considerations based on his first-hand knowledge of the deep and abiding conflicts between nationalities in the polyglot states of Central and Eastern Europe leading up to World War One and during the subsequent interwar period. Thus Mises did not evaluate immigration in terms of purely economic optima such as maximizing the productivity of human labor, irrespective of the political context. Rather, he assessed the effects of immigration from the viewpoint of the classical liberal regime of private property. My purpose in this short essay is to set forth Mises’s views on immigration as he developed them as an integral part of the classical liberal program he elaborated. I shall not attempt to criticize or evaluate his views.
    Liberal Nationalism

    For Mises, liberalism first emerged and expressed itself in the nineteenth century as a political movement in the form of “peaceful nationalism.” Its two fundamental principles were freedom or, more concretely, “the right of self-determination of peoples” and national unity or the “nationality principle.” The two principles were indissolubly linked. The primary goal of the liberal nationalist movements (Italian, Polish, Greek, German, Serbian, etc.) was the liberation of their peoples from the despotic rule of kings and princes. Liberal revolution against despotism necessarily took on a nationalist character for two reasons. First, many of the royal despots were foreign, for example, the Austrian Hapsburgs and French Bourbons who ruled the Italians, and the Prussian king and Russian Czar who subjugated the Poles. Second, and more important, political realism dictated “the necessity of setting the alliance of the oppressed against the alliance of the oppressors in order to achieve freedom at all, but also the necessity of holding together in order to find in unity the strength to preserve freedom”. This alliance of the oppressed was founded on national unity based on a common language, culture, and modes of thinking and acting.
    Even though forged in wars of liberation, liberal nationalism was for Mises both peaceful and cosmopolitan. Not only did the separate national liberation movements view each other as brothers in their common struggle against royal despotism, but they embraced the principles of economic liberalism, “which proclaims the solidarity of interests among all peoples.” Mises stresses the compatibility of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and peace:
    [T]he nationality principle includes only the rejection of every overlordship; it demands self-determination, autonomy. Then, however, its content expands; not only freedom but also unity is the watchword. But the desire for national unity, too, is above all thoroughly peaceful. . . . [N]ationalism does not clash with cosmopolitanism, for the unified nation does not want discord with neighboring peoples, but peace and friendship.1
    As a classical liberal, Mises is careful to specify that the right of self-determination is not a collective right but an individual right: “It is not the right of self determination of a delimited national unit, but rather the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong.” Mises makes it crystal clear that self-determination is an individual right that would have to be granted to “every individual person . . . if it were in any way possible.” It should also be noted in this respect that Mises rarely speaks of the “right of secession,” perhaps because of its historical connotation of the right of a government of a subordinate political unit to withdraw from a superior one.
    While championing of self-determination as an individual right, Mises argues that the nation has a fundamental and relatively permanent being independent of the transient state (or states) which may govern it at any given time. Thus he refers to the nation as “an organic entity [which] can be neither increased nor reduced by changes in states.” Accordingly, Mises characterizes a man’s “compatriots” as “those of his fellow men with whom he shares a common land and language and with whom he often forms an ethnic and spiritual community as well.” In the same vein, Mises cites the German author J. Grimm, who refers to the “natural law . . . that not rivers and not mountains form the boundary lines of peoples and that for a people that has moved over mountains and rivers, its own language alone can set the boundary.” The nationality principle therefore implies that liberal nation-states may comprise a monoglot people inhabiting geographically non-contiguous regions, provinces and even villages. Mises contends that nationalism is thus a natural outcome of and in complete harmony with individual rights: “The formation of [liberal democratic] states comprising all the members of a national group was the result of the exercise of the right of self determination, not its purpose.”2
    It should be noted here that, in contrast to many modern libertarians who view individuals as atomistic beings who lack emotional affinities and spiritual bonds with selected fellow humans, Mises affirms the reality of the nation as “an organic entity.” For Mises the nation comprises humans who perceive and act toward one another in a way that separates them from other groups of people based on the meaning and significance the compatriots attach to objective factors such as shared language, traditions, ancestry and so on. Membership in a nation, no less than in a family, involves concrete acts of volition based on subjective perceptions and preferences with respect to a complex of objective historical circumstances. According to Murray Rothbard, who shares Mises’s view of the reality of the nation separate from the state apparatus:
    Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one of several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. . . . The ‘nation’ cannot be precisely defined; it is a complex and varying constellation of different forms of communities, languages, ethnic groups or religions. . . . The question of nationality is made more complex by the interplay of objectively existing reality and subjective perceptions.
    Colonialism as the Denial of the Right of Self-Determination

    Unlike many late 19th- and early 20th-century liberals, Mises was a passionate anti-colonialist. As a radical liberal, he recognized the universality of the right of self determination and the nationality principle for all peoples and races. He wrote powerful and scathing indictments against the European subjugation and mistreatment of African and Asian peoples and demanded a quick and complete dismantling of colonial regimes. It is worthwhile quoting Mises on this at length:
    The basic idea of colonial policy was to take advantage of the military superiority of the white race over the members of other races. The Europeans set out, equipped with all the weapons and contrivances that their civilization placed at their disposal, to subjugate weaker peoples, to rob them of their property, and to enslave them. Attempts have been made to extenuate and gloss over the true motive of colonial policy with the excuse that its sole object was to make it possible for primitive peoples to share in the blessings of European civilization. . . . Could there be a more doleful proof of the sterility of European civilization than that it can be spread by no other means than fire and sword?
    No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified. The dominion of Europeans in Africa and in important parts of Asia is absolute. It stands in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism and democracy, and there can be no doubt that we must strive for its abolition. . . . European conquerors . . . have brought arms and engines of destruction of all kinds to the colonies; they have sent out their worst and most brutal individuals as officials and officers; at the point of the sword they have set up a colonial rule that in its sanguinary cruelty rivals the despotic system of the Bolsheviks. Europeans must not be surprised if the bad example that they themselves have set in their colonies now bears evil fruit. In any case, they have no right to complain pharisaically about the low state of public morals among the natives. Nor would they be justified in maintaining that the natives are not yet mature enough for freedom and that they still need at least several years of further education under the lash of foreign rulers before they are capable of being, left on their own.
    In those areas where native peoples were strong enough to mount armed resistance to colonial despotism, Mises enthusiastically supported and cheered on these national liberation movements: “In Abyssinia, in Mexico, in the Caucasus, in Persia, in China—everywhere we see the imperialist aggressors in retreat, or at least already in great difficulties.”
    To completely phase out colonialism, Mises proposed the establishment of a temporary protectorate under the aegis of the League of Nations. But he made it clear that such an arrangement was “to be viewed only as a transitional stage” and that the ultimate goal must be “the complete liberation of the colonies from the despotic rule under which they live.” Mises based his demand for the recognition of the right of self-determination and respect for the nationality principle among colonized peoples on the bedrock of individual rights:
    No one has a right to thrust himself into the affairs of others in order to further their interest, and no one ought, when he has his own interests in view, to pretend that he is acting selflessly only in the interest of others.
    The Breakdown of Liberal Nationalism: Majority Rule and Nationality Conflicts

    This bring us to Mises’s key insight into the irreconcilable “conflict of nationalities” bred by majority rule—even under liberal democratic constitutions. As a keen observer of the pre- and post Great War polyglot states of Central and Eastern Europe, Mises noted that “national struggles can only arise on the soil of freedom.” Thus as prewar Austria approached freedom, “the violence of the struggle between the nationalities grew.” With the collapse of the old royalist state, these struggles were “carried on only more bitterly in the new states, where ruling majorities confront national minorities without the mediation of the authoritarian state, which softens much harshness.” Mises attributes such a counterintuitive outcome to the fact that the nationality principle was not respected in the creation of the new states. Mises’s point is illustrated in the modern ethnic conflicts that erupted in the wake of the collapse of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia.3
    Mises maintains that two or more “nations” cannot peacefully coexist under a unitary democratic government. National minorities in a democracy are “completely politically powerless” because they have no chance of peacefully influencing the majority linguistic group. The latter represents “a cultural circle that is closed” to minority nationalities and whose political ideas are “thought, spoken, and written in a language that they do not understand.” Even where proportional representation prevails, the national minority “still remains excluded from collaboration in political life.” According to Mises, because the minority has no prospect of one day attaining power, the activity of its representatives “remains limited from the beginning to fruitless criticism . . . that . . . can lead to no political goal.” Thus, concludes Mises, even if the member of the minority nation, “according to the letter of the law, be a citizen with full rights . . . in truth he is politically without rights, a second class citizen, a pariah.”
    Mises characterizes majority rule as a form of colonialism from the point of view of the minority nation in a polyglot territory: “[It] signifies something quite different here than in nationally uniform territories; here, for a part of the people, it is not popular rule but foreign rule.” Peaceful liberal nationalism therefore is inevitably stifled in polyglot territories governed by a unitary state, because, Mises argues, “democracy seems like oppression to the minority. Where only the choice is open oneself to suppress or be suppressed, one easily decides for the former.” Thus, for Mises, democracy means the same thing for the minority as “subjugation under the rule of others,” and this “holds true everywhere and, so far, for all times.” Mises dismisses “the often cited” counter-example of Switzerland as irrelevant because local self-rule was not disturbed by “internal migrations” between the different nationalities. Had significant migration established the presence of substantial national minorities in some of the cantons, “the national peace of Switzerland would already have vanished long ago.”
    With respect to regions inhabited by different nationalities, Mises therefore concludes, “the right of self-determination works to the advantage only of those who comprise the majority.” This is especially true, for example, in interventionist states where education is compulsory and “peoples speaking different languages live together side by side and intermingled in polyglot confusion.” Under these conditions, formal schooling is a source of “spiritual coercion” and “one means of oppressing nationalities.” The very choice of the language of instruction can “alienate children from the nationality to which their parents belong” and “over the years, determine the nationality of a whole area.” The school thus becomes the source of irreconcilable national conflict and “a political prize of highest importance.” With respect to the debate over compulsory education, Mises emphasizes, the only effective solution is to depoliticize schooling by abolishing both compulsory education laws and political involvement with schools, leaving the education of children “entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.”
    Compulsory education is only an extreme example of how interventionism exacerbates the inevitable conflict between different nationalities that are living together under the jurisdiction of a single state. In such a situation, Mises argues: “Every interference on the part of government in economic life can become a means of persecuting the members of nationalities speaking a language different from that of the ruling group.” Perhaps Mises’s most important insight, however, is that even under a laissez-faire system, where government is rigorously restricted to “protecting and preserving the life, liberty, property and health of the individual citizen,” the political arena will still degenerate into a battleground between disparate nationalities residing within its geographical jurisdiction. Even the routine activities of the police and judicial system in this ideal liberal regime “can become dangerous in areas where any basis at all can be found for discriminating between one group and another in the conduct of official business.”4 This is especially true in states where “differences of religion, nationality, or the like have divided the population into groups separated by a gulf so deep as to exclude every impulse of fairness or humanity and to leave room for nothing but hate.” Mises gives the example of a judge “who acts consciously, or still more often unconsciously, in a biased manner” because he believes “he is fulfilling a higher duty when he makes use of the powers and prerogatives of his office in the service of his own group.”
    Not only is the member of a national minority subjected to ingrained and routine bias in the political sphere, he is unable to grasp the thought and ideology that shape political affairs. His social and political worldview as well as his cultural and religious attitudes reflect ideas formulated and discussed in the national literature of a foreign language, and these ideas diverge, possibly radically, from those of the majority linguistic group. According to Mises even though political and cultural ideas are transmitted and shared among all nations, “every nation develops currents of ideas in its own special way and assimilates them differently. In every people they encounter another national character and another constellation of conditions.” Mises gives the example of how the political ideal of socialism differed between Germany and France, and between the latter two and Russia.
    The result of this natural “nationalizing” and differentiating of even similar ideas and intellectual trends is that the member of the minority nation confronts a linguistic and intellectual barrier that prevents him from meaningfully participating in the political discussion that shapes the laws under which he lives. Explains Mises:
    Cast into the form of statute law, the outcome of [the majority’s] political discussions acquires direct significance for the citizen who speaks a foreign tongue, since he must obey the law; yet he has the feeling that he is excluded from effective participation in shaping the will of the legislative authority or at least that he is not allowed to cooperate in shaping it to the same extent as those whose native tongue is that of the ruling majority. And when he appears before a magistrate or any administrative official as a party to a suit or petition, he stands before men whose political thought is foreign to him because it developed under different ideological influences. . . . At every turn the member of a national minority is made to feel that he lives among strangers and that he is, even if the letter of the law denies it, a second-class citizen.
    The result of the political impotence of the national minority in a majoritarian democracy is that it perceives itself to be a conquered or colonized people. For as Mises points out: “The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest. . . .” In the 1920s Mises had already identified the phenomenon of what today is misleadingly called “institutional racism”— because the problem lies not with all institutions, only political ones — but is better described as “democratic subjugation.” In the1960s, Malcolm X (1963) gave poignant expression to the yearning for self-determination on the part of minority African nationalities in the U.S., saddled with an interventionist state controlled by peoples of European extraction:
    This new type of black man, he doesn't want integration; he wants separation. Not segregation, separation. To him, segregation . . . means that which is forced upon inferiors by superiors. . . . In the white community, the white man controls the economy, his own economy, his own politics, his own everything. That's his community. But at the same time while the Negro lives in a separate community, it's a segregated community. Which means it's regulated from the outside by outsiders. The white man has all of the businesses in the Negro community. He runs the politics of the Negro community. He controls all the civic organizations in the Negro community. This is a segregated community. . . . We don't go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy; you control your own politics; you control your own society; you control your own everything. You have yours and you control yours; we have ours and we control ours.
    In analyzing the causes and solution of nationality conflicts, Mises coined the terms “militant” or “aggressive” nationalism, which he contrasted with “liberal” or “peaceful” nationalism. Thus for Mises, the choice was never between nationalism and a bland, atomistic “globalism”; the real choice was either nationalism that was cosmopolitan and embraced universal individual rights and free trade or militant nationalism intent on subjugating and oppressing other nations. He attributed the rise of anti-liberal nationalism to the failure to apply the right of self-determination and the nationality principle consistently and to the utmost degree possible in the formation of new political entities in the wake of the overthrow of royal despotism by war or revolution. The consequence was peoples differentiated by language, heritage, religion, etc. artificially and involuntarily bound together by arbitrary political ties. The inevitable outcome of these polyglot, mixed-nation-states was the suppression of minorities by the majority nationality, a bitter struggle for control of the state apparatus, and the creation of mutual and deep-seated distrust and hatred.5 This state of affairs often culminated in state-sanctioned physical violence, including the expropriation and expulsion and even the murder of minority populations.
    Freedom of Movement Versus the Right of Self-Determination of Peoples

    Mises argues that all of this could have been avoided if only the full liberal agenda which includes, in addition to an economic policy of domestic laissez-faire and international free trade in goods, the crucial right of self-determination and the nationality principle to which it gives rise. Mises does not mince words in describing the plight of minorities in an illiberal, interventionist system:
    If the government of these territories [inhabited by members of several nationalities] is not conducted along completely liberal lines, there can be no question of even an approach to equal rights in the treatment of the members of the various national groups. There can then be only rulers and those ruled. The only choice is whether one will be hammer or anvil.
    Mises goes further, however, and argues that even an end to interventionism will not resolve the conflict of nationalities. Almost alone among classical liberals of his era and modern libertarians, Mises clearly recognizes that laissez-faire capitalism and free trade are necessary but not sufficient to ensure peace among different groups of individuals forced to live under a unified political system who voluntarily and naturally self-identify as different peoples or nations on the basis of language, shared customs and traditions, religion, heritage or any other objective factor that is subjectively meaningful for them. As Mises states
    All these disadvantages [experienced by minorities] are felt to be very oppressive even in a state with a liberal constitution in which the activity of the government is restricted to the protection of the life and property of the citizens. But they become quite intolerable in an interventionist or socialist state.
    For Mises the best that can be said of a government whose functions are strictly limited to protection of person and property and enforcement of contract is that it does not “aggravate artificially the friction that must arise from this living together of different groups.”
    Mises defends the complete liberal agenda—the laissez-faire and the nationality principles—against those who vacuously attribute the “violent antagonisms” between nations inhabiting a single political jurisdiction to an “innate antipathy” between different peoples. To the contrary, argues Mises, despite the hatreds that may naturally exist between various groups of people of the same nationality, they are able to get along peacefully when living under the jurisdiction of the same state, while different nationalities that are forcibly bound together under common political arrangements are in constant conflict:
    The Bavarian hates the Prussian; the Prussian, the Bavarian. No less fierce is the hatred existing among individual groups within both France and Poland. Nevertheless, Germans, Poles, and Frenchmen manage to live peacefully within their own countries. What gives the antipathy of the Pole for the German and of the German for the Pole a special political significance is the aspiration of each of the two peoples to seize for itself political control of the border areas in which Germans and Poles live side by side and to use it to oppress the members of the other nationality. What has kindled the hatred between nations to a consuming fire is the fact that people want to use the schools to estrange children from the language of their fathers and to make use of the courts and administrative offices, political and economic measures, and outright expropriation to persecute those speaking a foreign tongue.
    So it is not natural antipathies between peoples—which may or may not exist—but the political denial of the right of self-determination that is the underlying cause of national conflicts. In this vein, Mises issues a dire and, in hindsight, prescient warning: “As long as the liberal program is not completely carried out in the territories of mixed nationality, hatred between members of different nations must become ever fiercer and continue to ignite new wars and rebellions.” This is certainly true of today’s world, particularly in Asia and Africa, where European imperialists and colonialists dragooned different “nations” (tribes, chiefdoms, linguistic groups, ethnicities, religions) into deeply dysfunctional political unions. Most of the forty wars currently being waged on these continents are “intrastate” or civil wars and, of these, most are “fueled as much by racial, ethnic, or religious animosities as by ideological fervor.” At their root lie the attempts of minority groups to resist or end oppression by the majority by either seizing the existing state apparatus, seceding from the state, or creating an entirely new state, e.g., ISIL.
    This brings us to the vexed question of immigration. Mises summarily dismisses the purely economic arguments against free immigration as fallacious. He points out that, from the global point of view, migration raises the productivity of human labor, the supply of goods, and standards of living because it facilitates the reallocation of labor (and capital) from regions with less advantageous natural conditions of production to those with more advantageous natural conditions. Barriers to labor migration therefore cause a misallocation of labor and its geographic mal-distribution, with a relative oversupply in some areas and undersupply in other areas. The effects of migration barriers are thus exactly the same as the effects of tariffs and other barriers to the international trade of goods: the reduction of productive efficiency and income because comparatively unfavorable opportunities for production are exploited in some regions while comparatively favorable opportunities remain unutilized in others.
    Although Mises argues that free movement of goods, capital and labor tends to maximize the productivity of labor and the total output of goods and services, he does not envision this as the ultimate goal of liberalism. As Mises argues in another connection, it was a mistake to believe “that the essence of liberal programs was not private property but ‘free competition’ [i.e., free of the ‘economic power’ of large business enterprises].” The same also applies when evaluating the social desirability of labor migration: the welfare standard for Mises and classical liberals is not the “economistic,” Chicago-school goals of production efficiency or maximum labor productivity measured in pecuniary terms but the securing of a full private property regime. For it is the operation of the unhampered market based on private property that best satisfies consumer preferences for exchangeable and non-exchangeable goods, which is the ultimate goal of all economic activity. In his brilliant but neglected analysis of the labor market in his economic treatise, Human Action, Mises points out that even the completely unhampered migration of labor across political boundaries does not lead to maximum labor productivity and a distribution of labor that equalizes wage rates for the same kind and quality of labor services throughout the global economy. The reason?
    The worker and the consumer are the same person. . . . Men cannot sever their decisions concerning the utilization of their working power from those concerning the enjoyment of their earnings. Descent, language, education, religion, mentality, family bonds, and social environment tie the worker in such a way that he does not choose the place and the branch of his work merely with regard to the height of wage rates. [Paragraph break suppressed.]
    In discussing labor migration Mises therefore shifts the focus from the analytical abstraction of the “laborer” seeking the highest wages consonant with his leisure preferences to the real human actor who demonstrates preferences across a broad range of goals that include non-exchangeable goods like close proximity and association with members of the same family, religious affiliation, ethnicity or language group. Consequently, Mises explicitly recognizes that once the outdated assumptions underlying the free-trade doctrine advanced by Ricardo and the classical economists are dropped, and the international mobility of capital and labor as well as goods is considered, the case for free trade, while it remains valid “from the purely economic point of view . . presents a quite changed point of departure for testing the extraeconomic reasons for and against the protective system.” Mises thus takes the analysis of migration beyond the realm of narrowly economic considerations and brings it into contact with the concrete political reality of the democratic mixed-nation-state and its characteristic suppression and violation of the property rights of national minorities by the majority nation.
    This analysis leads Mises to view mass “immigration,” that is, labor migration across state borders, even when it occurs for purely economic reasons, as posing an inherent problem. Mises maintains that the creation of mixed-nation-states resulting from the immigration of workers of a foreign nationality, “gives rise once again to all those conflicts that generally develop in polyglot territories” and “to particularly characteristic conflicts between peoples.” Mises does recognize that peaceful cultural and political assimilation can take place “if the immigrants come not all at once but little by little, so that the assimilation process among the early immigrants is already completed or at least already under way when the newcomers arrive.” He cites the example of Chinese immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century, which did occur in a manner amenable to assimilation. Mises remarks, however, that “perhaps” the Chinese would have “achieve[d] domination in their new home . . . in the western states of the Union if legislation had not restricted their immigration in time.” But this is strictly a positive statement and Mises draws no policy implications from it.
    Indeed, Mises exposes the economic arguments to restrict immigration put forward by protectionist trade unions in relatively high-wage countries like the U.S and Australia as transparently self-serving and injurious to the economic interests of their fellow nationals as well as contrary to the teachings of sound economic theory. Mises takes a more measured tone when considering the extra-economic argument in favor of immigration restriction that is disingenuously resorted to by the protectionists as a fallback position. According to the latter argument, in the absence of immigration barriers “hordes of immigrants” of non-English-speaking European and Asian nationalities would “inundate Australia and America.” Because these immigrants would arrive rapidly and in great numbers, the argument asserts, they could not be assimilated and Anglo-Saxons in the host countries would find themselves in a minority and their “exclusive dominion . . . would be destroyed.”
    In evaluating this argument, Mises emphasizes the political problems that would arise in a mixed-nation-state created overnight by mass immigration:
    These fears may perhaps be exaggerated with regard to the United States. As regards Australia, they certainly are not. . . . If Australia is thrown open to immigration, it can be assumed with great probability that its population would in a few years consist of Japanese, Chinese and Malayans. . . . The entire nation [not just workers] is unanimous, however, in fearing inundation by foreigners. The present inhabitants of those favored lands [the U.S. and Australia] fear that some day they could be reduced to a minority in their own country and that they would then have to suffer all horrors of national persecution to which, for instance, the Germans today [1927] are exposed in Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Poland.
    While Mises does not take an explicit position on the desirability of a policy curbing massive immigration flows that are induced by economic opportunity, he acknowledges that “these fears” of the nationality inhabiting the receiving country “are justified,” especially in a world of interventionist states. Mises, who for many years observed first-hand the egregious maltreatment of national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, vividly expresses the basis of the majority nation’s fear of being transformed into a national minority:
    As long as the state is granted the vast powers which it has today and which public opinion considers to be its right, the thought of having to live in a state whose government is in the hands of members of a foreign nationality is positively terrifying. It is frightful to live in a state in which at every turn one is exposed to persecution—masquerading under the guise of justice—by a ruling majority. It is dreadful to be handicapped even as a child in school on account of one’s nationality and to be in the wrong before every judicial and administrative authority because one belongs to a national minority.
    Thus, Mises views immigration as always and everywhere a “problem” to which there is “no solution,” as long as interventionist political regimes are the norm. Only when the crossing of state borders by members of a different nation portend no political dangers for the indigenous nationality will the “problem of immigration” disappear and be replaced by the benign migration of labor that creates unalloyed and mutual economic advantages for all individuals and peoples. From the Mises’s perspective, then, the solution to the immigration problem is not to legislate some vague, ad hoc right to the “freedom of movement” between existing fixed-boundary states. Rather, it is to complete the laissez-faire liberal revolution and secure private property rights by providing for the continual redrawing of state boundaries in accordance with the right of self-determination and the nationality principle. Then — and only then — can the continual and wealth-creating reallocation of labor throughout the world required by a dynamic capitalist economy be peacefully accommodated without precipitating political conflict.
    Conclusion

    Mises was a radical liberal nationalist and cosmopolitan whose overarching goal was to promote policies that facilitated the peaceful extension of the social division of labor founded on private property to all individuals and nations. He acknowledged the reality of separate nations and its meaningfulness for political and economic policy analysis. He recognized that political borders that were not formed according to the nationality principle were an insurmountable impediment to the fullest realization of the concept of free trade and an important source of national conflicts and protectionism that destroyed wealth. In particular, Mises realized that “immigration” was not the solution to the problem of the uneconomic spatial distribution of labor, but the very cause of the problem. The problem of immigration would be solved only with the consummation of the classical liberal revolution in the universal recognition of the right of self-determination. Then the problem—and the very phenomenon—of immigration would disappear, as the borders of states would move with the migration of peoples and nations.
    Further Reading

    Mises, Ludwig von. 1983. Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Politics and History of Our Time. Trans. Leland B. Yeager. New York: New York University Press.
    _____. 1985. Liberalism in the Classical Tradition. Trans. Ralph Raico. 3rd ed. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY and San Fancisco: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. and Cobden Press (co-publishers)
    _____. 1996. Critique of Interventionism. Trans. Hans F. Sennholz. 2nd ed. Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.
    _____. 1998. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Scholar’s Edition. Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute.
    Rothbard, Murray N. 1993. “Hands Off the Serbs.” RRR: Rothbard-Rockwell Report. Pp. 1-5.
    _____. 1994. “Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation-State.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 11:1 (Fall): 1-10.

    • 1. Mises (1983, p. 34) gives the charming example of the Italian nationalists who shouted to the imperial Austrian soldiers: “Go back across the Alps and we will become brothers again.”
    • 2. However, Mises (1983, p. 37) concedes that in rare cases, “where freedom and self government already prevail and seem assured without it,” such as Switzerland, the right of self determination may not result in a nationally unified state.
    • 3. On the ethnic-religious conflicts in the former Yugoslavia see Rothbard (1993; 1994).
    • 4. Rothbard (1994, pp. 5-6) makes a similar point about the unavoidable political conflicts that arise in a situation where different nationalities are bound together under the jurisdiction of a single, laissez-faire liberal government: “But even under the minimal state, national boundaries would still make a difference, often a big one, to the inhabitants of the area. For in what language . . . will be the street signs, telephone books, court proceedings, or school classes of the area?
    • 5. A more euphonious term than “mixed-nation-states” for these political entities would be “multinational states” but given its current connotation, the latter term is likely to be misleading.


    Joseph Salerno is academic vice president of the Mises Institute, professor of economics at Pace University, and editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.
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  3. #2
    No response from the open borders crowd I see.
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    I don't 100% agree but I mostly do.
    I'm not sure, based on all your past assertions and stances I'm aware of, what part of this article you might agree with. I'm going to make the assumption you actually read it.
    Partisan politics, misleading or emotional bill titles, and 4D chess theories are manifestations of the same lie—that the text of the Constitution, the text of legislation, and plain facts do not matter; what matters is what you want to believe. From this comes hypocrisy. And where hypocrisy thrives, virtue recedes. Without virtue, liberty dies. - Justin Amash, March 2018

  5. #4
    Anyhow, yeah, pretty good article. If I were to differ, it would be with the bold way Salerno starts off his conclusion, that "Mises was a radical liberal nationalist..." I would be a little careful calling Mises a nationalist since, although he spoke positively of the national principle, he wasn't associating the term (in this formulation) with a nation-state's territorial borders. Mises is very careful in his terminology and "nationalism" almost always means something extremely negative in his writings.

    In Omnipotent Government:

    "Neither is nationalism identical with patriotism. Patriotism is the zeal for one’s own nation’s welfare, flowering, and freedom. Nationalism is one of the various methods proposed for the attainment of these ends. But the liberals contend that the means recommended by nationalism are inappropriate, and that their application would not only not realize the ends sought but on the contrary must result in disaster for the nation. The liberals too are patriots, but their opinions with regard to the right ways toward national prosperity and greatness radically differ from those of the nationalists. They recommend free trade, international division of labor, good will, and peace among the nations, not for the sake of foreigners but for the promotion of the happiness of their own nation.

    "It is the aim of nationalism to promote the well-being of the whole nation or of some groups of its citizens by inflicting harm on foreigners. The outstanding method of modern nationalism is discrimination against foreigners in the economic sphere. Foreign goods are excluded from the domestic market or admitted only after the payment of an import duty. Foreign labor is barred from competition in the domestic labor market. Foreign capital is liable to confiscation. This economic nationalism must result in war whenever those injured believe that they are strong enough to brush away by armed violent action the measures detrimental to their own welfare."
    Salerno leaves out an illuminating quote from Nation, State and Economy that might seem very alarming to a Bannonite nationalist -

    "The nationality principle above all bears no sword against members of other nations. It is directed in tyrannos.

    Therefore, above all, there is also no opposition between national and citizen-of-the-world attitudes."
    In other words, if Mises is a radical liberal "nationalist," he is simultaneously an economic "globalist."
    Partisan politics, misleading or emotional bill titles, and 4D chess theories are manifestations of the same lie—that the text of the Constitution, the text of legislation, and plain facts do not matter; what matters is what you want to believe. From this comes hypocrisy. And where hypocrisy thrives, virtue recedes. Without virtue, liberty dies. - Justin Amash, March 2018

  6. #5
    From the Mises’s perspective, then, the solution to the immigration problem is not to legislate some vague, ad hoc right to the “freedom of movement” between existing fixed-boundary states. Rather, it is to complete the laissez-faire liberal revolution and secure private property rights by providing for the continual redrawing of state boundaries in accordance with the right of self-determination and the nationality principle. Then — and only then — can the continual and wealth-creating reallocation of labor throughout the world required by a dynamic capitalist economy be peacefully accommodated without precipitating political conflict.
    Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,--
    Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
    Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
    ‫‬‫‬

  7. #6
    I don't know that Salerno's characterization of Mises' position is altogether correct, but I'll go ahead and address what was said:

    Quote Originally Posted by Article
    For Mises, liberalism first emerged and expressed itself in the nineteenth century as a political movement in the form of “peaceful nationalism.”
    This was and is a common misconception. Liberalism was born under the Old Regime, well prior to 1789. Nationalism and democracy were (along with socialism) the children of the revolution. The 19th century nationalists and democrats (and also the socialists) merely used the language of liberalism to advance their own causes (e.g. the "liberty" of the nation to govern itself, which has no bearing on the individual liberties valued by liberalism). The practical effect of the rise of nationalism and democracy (and obviously socialism) was to retard and ultimately reverse the progress of liberalism. Consider that modern "liberals" (i.e. socialists who've co-opted the term) also applaud the 19th century nationalists and democrats. Why? Because those 19th century nationalists and democrats really were the progenitors of modern "liberalism," while being the gravediggers of genuine liberalism.

    It should be noted here that, in contrast to many modern libertarians who view individuals as atomistic beings who lack emotional affinities and spiritual bonds with selected fellow humans, Mises affirms the reality of the nation as “an organic entity.”
    I don't recall ever hearing anyone (libertarian or otherwise) deny that nations exist. The issue isn't whether they exist but whether their existence has any moral implications: i.e. whether nations have rights that supersede individual rights. Similarly, that a libertarian rejects Marxist class theory doesn't mean that he denies that classes exist; he denies only that this has the implications that the Marxists claim).

    This bring us to Mises’s key insight into the irreconcilable “conflict of nationalities” bred by majority rule—even under liberal democratic constitutions. As a keen observer of the pre- and post Great War polyglot states of Central and Eastern Europe, Mises noted that “national struggles can only arise on the soil of freedom.” Thus as prewar Austria approached freedom, “the violence of the struggle between the nationalities grew.” With the collapse of the old royalist state, these struggles were “carried on only more bitterly in the new states, where ruling majorities confront national minorities without the mediation of the authoritarian state, which softens much harshness.” Mises attributes such a counterintuitive outcome to the fact that the nationality principle was not respected in the creation of the new states.
    National conflict intensified with the advent of democracy (indeed, the Habsburg's own nationalities problem was, in the first place, largely a result of partial democratization in the mid 19th century), but this is an argument against democracy, not an argument for more nationalism. Likewise with Mises' discussion of the schools, police, and other state institutions as weapons in the hands of nationalist partisans. The nationally homogeneous state which Mises is proposing is meant as a solution to a problem created by democracy. This only begs the question; why have democracy at all?

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by undergroundrr View Post
    Anyhow, yeah, pretty good article. If I were to differ, it would be with the bold way Salerno starts off his conclusion, that "Mises was a radical liberal nationalist..." I would be a little careful calling Mises a nationalist since, although he spoke positively of the national principle, he wasn't associating the term (in this formulation) with a nation-state's territorial borders. Mises is very careful in his terminology and "nationalism" almost always means something extremely negative in his writings.

    In Omnipotent Government:



    Salerno leaves out an illuminating quote from Nation, State and Economy that might seem very alarming to a Bannonite nationalist -



    In other words, if Mises is a radical liberal "nationalist," he is simultaneously an economic "globalist."
    This^^ Also, Mises says in "Liberalism":
    If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done. (Liberalism, pp. 109–10)
    and
    The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars. (Liberalism, p. 109)
    Quote Originally Posted by Torchbearer
    what works can never be discussed online. there is only one language the government understands, and until the people start speaking it by the magazine full... things will remain the same.
    Hear/buy my music here "government is the enemy of liberty"-RP Support me on Patreon here Ephesians 6:12

  9. #8
    Bump
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

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  11. #9
    The Irrepressible Rothbard

    Essays of Murray N. Rothbard
    Edited by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

    RACE! THAT MURRAY BOOK

    December 1994 Under the spell of a misplaced analogy from Darwinian theory, analysts for over a century liked to think of social change as necessarily gradual, minute, and glacial. The idea of any sort of radical or "revolutionary" social change became unfashionable among intellectuals and social scientists. The political and cultural revolutions of the twentieth century have altered that perspective, and observers are now more willing to entertain the idea of sudden revolutionary change.
    Well, one vital and recent social change has been not only truly revolutionary but has occurred at almost dizzying speed. Namely: Until literally mid-October 1994, it was shameful and taboo for anyone to talk publicly or write about, home truths which everyone, and I mean everyone, knew in their hearts and in private: that is, almost self-evident truths about race, intelligence, and heritability. What used to be widespread shared public knowledge about race and ethnicity among writers, publicists, and scholars, was suddenly driven out of the public square by Communist anthropologist Franz Boas and his associates in the 1930s, and it has been taboo ever since. Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.
    While, in contrast to many other countries, the professional egalitarian left in the United States has not been able to use government censorship as one of its weapons of expulsion, it has used every other smear and bullying tactic, high and low, to drive any such sentiments out of public life, to suppress discussion and scholarship, as well as any genuine freedom of inquiry or research in what had long been a flourishing area of study. In a deep sense, this was an early manifestation of Political Correctness, after which other virulent forms of PC were added on top of this previous foundation. In the area of scientific research, the last truthful comprehensive book on the subject, Race, by the great British scientist John R. Baker, was published by the distinguished Oxford University Press in the 1970s. But Oxford Press was virtually forced, by intense pressure, if not to withdraw the book openly, at least to suppress it in practice by giving it as little circulation as possible.
    For the rest of society, the racial thought police were able to suppress journalism, and to eliminate all Racially Incorrect traces not only of media sentiment, but even of humor, and the rich American heritage of ethnic humor has almost been stamped out of existence.
    The basic tactic of the egalitarian left rulers was, of course, not to dignify any books engaging in candid inquiry into the race question by openly rebutting them. After all, to engage in any sort of public debate, in lecture hall or in print, with The Enemy runs the risk of the egalitarian actually losing, or at least demonstrating to lay intellectuals or to the general public that maybe a plausible case can be made for this horrible heresy. So the ruling tactic of the left was to engage in what Harry Elmer Barnes, in another connection, called "the blackout," and for the rest to smear the heretic relentlessly with the usual PC smear labels we have come to know and love so well: "racist," "fascist," "Nazi," "sexist," "heterosexist," and so on. Better to black out and smear, to marginalize the heretic into shame and oblivion.
    The political situation of the 1930s and 40s was used to cunning effect by the egalitarian left to stamp out all opposition. Any expression of racial home truths was automatically lambasted as "fascist," "Nazi," and therefore ultra-rightist. In fact, all of this was a fabrication. The leading "racial scientists" from the 1890s until the 1930s were in agreement across the ideological and political spectrum. In fact, most of the leading racial scientists were Progressives, left-liberals, and New Dealers. In that period, only Communists and other Marxists were egalitarians, for ideological reasons. But the Commies were able to use their extensive ideological and propaganda machine during that era to somehow link Nazi persecution of Jews to racism, and with doctrines of racial superiority and inferiority. In that way, the Commies were able to bully or convert all manner of liberals and leftists, including those ex-Trotskyites and liberals who would much later become neoconservatives. This left the conservatives, who were the least amenable to Marxist influence, but who in turn were bullied into submission by being smeared savagely as "Hitlerite" for any expression of racialist views.
    In point of fact, however, it should be clear that Hitler and the Nazis did not persecute Jews because they believed Jews to be inferior in intelligence. And as for blacks, there were too few blacks residing in Europe for the Nazis to bother about, much less persecute. Where pre-World War II racialism was politically relevant was, e.g., in immigration-cutting policies in the United States, and in sterilization of welfare mothers as part of various state welfare programs. Both of these policies, however, could be and were supported on other than racialist grounds.
    During the past sixty years, racial research or expression of views by intellectuals has been marginalized and almost literally driven underground by pressure from above and from below. But in October, 1994, with incredible speed, the entire culture did a 180-degree turn. Upon the publication by the respected Establishment, The Free Press, of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, expressing in massively stupefying scholarly detail what everyone has always known but couldn't dare to express about race, intelligence, and heritability, the dam suddenly burst. It's not that all the reviews were favorable. Not at all. But the crucial point is that the Blackout suddenly collapsed; the Herrnstein-Murray book (since Herrnstein died before publication, it is now for all publicity purposes "the Murray book") is remarkably everywhere, attacked in Newsweek as well as the predictable New Republic, treated as The Cultural Phenomenon of the year. Not only that: the attacks may be bitter, but they are not the traditional mindless smears: no one has dismissed the book as "racist," "fascist," "neo-Nazi," and all the rest.
    There are many mind-boggling aspects to the Herrnstein-Murray breakthrough. The Bell Curve is becoming a runaway bestseller, certainly for a non-fiction work on a serious topic; and yet, it is not a book that more than a handful of scholars are actually going to read. How often do we see a 900-page work, filled with boring statistics and social science jargon, become a coffee-table book, the sort of book that my dear you simply have to display to show that you are abreast of the times?
    Perhaps the most mind-boggling cultural response, one that most needs explanation, was that of the Queen of middlebrow, the newspaper that Sets the Line telling intellectuals, media people, journalists, think-tankers, etc. what to think: the august New York Times Sunday Book Review. In fact, we can, for once, pinpoint the cultural and social revolution on the Race Question to one precise date: October 16, 1994 – the date when the august Establishment New York Times ostentatiously threw in the towel. For the Sunday Book Review devoted the front cover, and three entire pages to a blockbuster review of three recent "racist" books, a review which not only did not engage in the usual Marxoid smears, but was objective, respectful and actually favorable! We have to realize, in the first place, that such a length for a review in the Sunday Times is unprecedented; authors will kill for the publicity of having part of a page in the Review, much less three full pages. Second, instead of the usual Times practice of turning books of this type over to Harvard Marxist hatchetmen, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and biologist Richard Lewontin, or one of their ilk, the review is by New York Times science reporter Malcolm W. Browne, who treats these works in a way similar books should have been treated over the past six decades.
    Not only that: the Herrnstein-Murray book almost drowns its subject in statistics and qualifications, and it tries to downplay the entire race issue, devoting most of its space to inheritable differences among individuals within each ethnic or racial group. Truly incredible is the treatment Browne gives to the far harder-core, more ideologically explosive though also strictly scientific work of Professor J. Phillippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior, published by the respected and courageous Transaction Publishers affiliated with Rutgers University. Transaction has been, for decades, one of the very few publishers in America genuinely devoted to freedom of intellectual inquiry and freedom of scholarly expression. The third work is the unabashedly conservative-libertarian book by Smith College education professor Seymour Itzkoff, The Decline of Intelligence in America (Praeger). Not only are all these books treated soberly and favorably by Browne, but he also points out the shamefulness of the suppression of such views and research for decades. Thus, Browne writes that "the articulation of issues touching on group intelligence and ethnicity has been neither fashionable nor safe for the last three decades," but that these books are "worth plowing through and mulling over." For Browne agrees with these scholars that "the time has come to grasp the nettle of political heresy, to discard social myths and to come to grips with statistical evidence." And Browne concludes what for the Times is a massive review, that "the most insistent plea of the four authors is for freedom of debate and an end to the shroud of censorship imposed upon scientists and scholars by pressure groups and an acquiescing society." He then notes that Herrnstein and Murray write that "for the last 30 years, the concept of intelligence has been a pariah in the world of ideas," and adds that the "time has come to rehabilitate rational discourse on the subject." Browne's ringing last sentence: "It is hard to imagine a democratic society doing otherwise." Wowie!
    HOW COME? So how do we explain this phenomenon? How do we account for the fact that straight talk on race, intelligence, and heredity has gone, in one week, from being taboo to being almost old-hat? What in blazes has happened?
    In the first place, those who believe in the accidental theory of history have their work cut out for them. No one can convince me that, on a subject of such delicacy and of such magnitude, that this tremendous change of opinion was purely a matter of intellectual fashion, of spontaneous combustion, or sudden consideration and deep conviction. No topic can shift from being shamefully Naziish to respectable and even scientific status overnight and by sudden acclamation (the surprise here, to repeat, is not simply the favorable and long review in the Times, but that the critics suddenly shifted from blackout-and-smear to mere hostility and widespread publicity). Surely, in this particular case, the unprovable "paranoid" view that a few powerful Establishment figures pushed some button is far more plausible an explanation.
    SCIENCE WILL OUT So why did this incredible turnaround occur? In the first place, there is the important point that, praise the Lord, science and truth, though long delayed and deferred, will eventually win out. In the long run, truth cannot be suppressed. In the last few decades, there has been an explosion of genetic and intelligence research, here and in Europe, despite the atmosphere ranging from subtle to brutal suppression. Despite the lack of government or Establishment foundation research funding, despite academic assaults on scholars, and student and community thugs preventing such researchers from lecturing or teaching, there has been an overwhelming accumulation of scientific data confirming, time and again, what everyone knows from his own and from others' observations.
    Of the two authors of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray is the best-known in conservative circles as a neoconservative/left-libertarian researcher whose elaborate statistics confirmed what everyone knew anyway: that the welfare state injures, rather than benefits, its alleged beneficiaries, and only aggravates the problem. So what else is new, Charlie? But the real star of the duo is the late Harvard Professor Richard Herrnstein, a Harvard psychologist who was no conservative at all, but instead an old-fashioned left-liberal, that is, one of the rare liberals still dedicated to genuine freedom of inquiry and to the search for scientific truth. When, two decades ago, Herrnstein became interested in intelligence and heritability, and before he had even ventured into the troubled area of race, he suddenly found his classes and lectures invaded and himself physically assaulted by the student-community left. Refusing to be intimidated, Herrnstein pressed on, regardless of threats or of the developing storm of Political Incorrectness.
    Other scientists, here and abroad, including such intelligence experts as Belfast professor Richard Lynn, have confirmed these doctrines over and over. Phillippe Rushton, a heroic professor at University of Western Ontario, has literally not been able to teach any of his classes in person, because of continued disruption by thugs. (The "thug" category is not, despite implications of the U.S. media, confined to followers of General Cedras in Haiti.) Fortunately, the Western Ontario University authorities have backed Rushton's academic independence to the hilt, and he is permitted to have all of his lectures shown to classes on videotape.
    In the light of this explosion of research, it has been increasingly difficult for the Marxoid left to maintain its egalitarian posture, which more and more smacks of the absurd environmentalist "Lysenkoism" of the shameful era of Soviet genetics. As a result, the scholarly left has fallen back on two tactics to combat the inegalitarian threat. One is the frank if truly horrifying admission that "even if racialist science is true, it should be suppressed because its social and political conclusions are immoral." Such a frank position that truth must be suppressed for alleged social or political considerations, is a true "treason of the intellectuals," a candid junking of the entire point of scholarship and research. It is a position that cannot be condemned too severely, and should be the occasion for the drumming of every advocate out of any sort of public discourse. For how can a self-proclaimed liar and suppressor of truth be taken seriously ever again?
    The second fallback position was a tactic that worked for a long time. Its success negates the Hayek position that the only sure way to convert the culture is to first convert the leading philosophers and scientists, who in turn persuade other academics, who in turn convert journalists and media people, who in turn change the course of public opinion. "part from the slowness of this process (it could take centuries), we have seen all too often that it has been short-circuited wherever science or other knowledge enters a hot-button area. Maybe it worked in the old days when journalists tried to be objective truth-seekers, and were content to sample and report to the public authoritative opinion in whatever science or discipline they were covering. As responsible journalists, they set aside their own personal views in the service of their once honorable profession. But in recent years, as we are all aware, journalists and media people have generally become not objective reporters, but missionary zealots with their own ideological agenda for brainwashing the public. We have seen this process in the various pesticide and other environmentalist scares of the last decades. Most scientists did not believe that Alar on apples was a big cancer threat (it is far less of a threat, ironically, than "natural" apples themselves). Most scientists do not believe that "global warming" has ever been established, much less worry about hair sprays or air-conditioners as an important contributor. The media people, knowing this, simply distort the process by always going for quotes to the small handful of scientific propagandists who are leftists with their own fanatical environmentalist agenda.
    The same has been true in the case of race and intelligence. One would think from the quantity of their quotes that the only biologists, geneticists, or intelligence experts in this huge country were Harvard Marxoids Gould and Lewontin, occasionally backstopped by their leftist colleague Leon Kamin. One would certainly never know that the bulk of their colleagues differ totally with their professional-egalitarian position. Unlike many other areas, there is no media attempt to "balance" in these fields.
    One might excuse this bias as a typical media search for a punchy sound-bite, for a quick dramatic quote, whereas scientists tend to talk in measured, qualified tones. But this defense would be a cop-out, since the media could at least inform us that most scientists disagreed, and they could seek out some punchy counter-quotes from people like Rushton, and treat them with the same deference they show Harvard Marxists. Hah!
    At any rate, we can say that in mid-October, the dam burst, and the accumulation of scientific data and research simply became too much for Gould, Lewontin and Company to block.
    Certainly, this accumulating tension between scientific truth and the ruling propaganda is part of the explanation of what's happened. But the problem is that it's only a long-run explanation. We still have the puzzle; why did the breakthrough occur now, in October 1994, and why does it center around the Herrnstein-Murray book? All the boring statistics? Sure, but, for example, decades ago, Audrey M. Shuey's book The Testing of Negro Intelligence, published by a small southern university press, was equally impressive in its statistics, and yet it sank without a trace.
    Part of the answer, I believe, is precisely that Audrey Shuey was not a neocon beloved by conservative and free-market think-tanks, and she was not a Harvard professor. All too often, the key to public and scholarly success is not what you're saying, but who you are and who is backing you.
    JUSTIFYING THE ELITE So let us go on to a bold, though persuasive, hypothesis: the powerful neocons, despite the smallness of their number, have an iron grip on much public political opinion – through their raft of syndicated columnists, their control of numerous Official Conservative and left-libertarian Beltway think-tanks, financed by wealthy neocon foundations, as well as their domination of influential magazines and organs of opinion, headed by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Let's assume – and there have been increasing indications of this in recent years – that the neocons have decided to junk their long-time support for the Black Movement. But this doesn't explain the turnaround of the New York Times, which is no longer neocon (since the exit of Abe Rosenthal, John Corry, and Hilton Kramer), and is now the voice of left-liberalism in the United States (followed closely by the Washington Post). So what happened with liberals? To put it bluntly, white liberals have gotten sick of the Black Movement. Their hysteria about the black nationalism of Louis Farrakhan and its infusion into the NAACP under Benjamin Chavis is a case in point. For why should anyone not a member of the NAACP care what it does, or who it selects as its head? But white liberals care deeply, because the black nationalists are right about this one: the NAACP, and other "civil rights" organizations, were dominated from the very beginning by a minority of white leaders, partially through white financing and partly through white influence over the mainstream media and mainstream politicians. I don't blame blacks one bit for being sick of white control of ostensibly black organizations; if I were black, I'd be trying to cast these people off myself. And why not?
    But white liberals, in contrast (and neocons, too, who are, after all, only right-wingish liberals) feel that the blacks are ingrates, as well as threats to their own power. So are white liberals, also driven by the well-known intensifying horrors of crime and welfare, finally fed up. They decided, at long last, that they had had enough, and that they would pull the plug on the black movement that they had done so much to create and foster. As part of what must have been this deliberate, and weighty decision, the liberals (and neocons) decided to remove the stranglehold that the Marxoid Far Left, the Goulds, the Lewontins, and their ilk, had been permitted to maintain in suppressing scientific truth in the area of race and intelligence. And then, bingo! the dam broke. The United Left Front of neocons, liberals, blacks and the Far Left had suddenly dissolved.
    The fact that the neocons and liberals chose to take their stand on a book filled with statistics and the rest of the prestigious apparatus of science, co-authored by a liberal Harvard professor and by a neocon-left-libertarian think-tanker, now makes a great deal of sense. It is hardly a coincidence. What better book on which to throw down the gauntlet to the Hard Left?
    But there is another, more hidden, and more sinister, aspect to this new stand by neocons and liberals. When all is said and done, as we will emphasize further below, both neocons and liberals are statists. They don't want freedom or free markets. They don't want, for example, genuinely private or home schooling. What they want is national statism run, not by leftists, but by themselves. They want their own kind of welfare state, and they want a nationalized educational system, public and private, run by themselves. Both groups are strongly opposed to the populist movement sweeping this country, a movement profoundly hostile to any form of national socialism and to its embodiment in Washington, D.C. Liberals and neocons both favor rule by a small Washington power elite, an elite which they claim to be merely a natural "meritocracy." Since they, the liberal and neocon intellectuals and technocrats, generally have higher IQs than most of the rest of the population, what better way to justify their own meritocratic rule than by invoking the majesty of Science? Here we have a key to the sudden embrace by neocons, and even by liberals of the scientific truth about race and intelligence.
    BUT AFTER ALL, SO WHAT? There are many wonderful things that paleos, conservatives and libertarians, can celebrate about this new revolutionary cultural turn on race. First and foremost, and despite the common smears against paleos as theocrats and inveterate opponents of free speech, paleos are the most fervent and genuine advocates of freedom of speech and of inquiry in this country. The end of the blackout and of the smears against truth-seekers in the area of race and intelligence is a wonderful thing for its own sake. And second, of course, the egalitarian myth has been the major ideological groundwork for the welfare state, and, in its racial aspect, for the entire vast, ever expanding civil rights-affirmative action-setaside-quota aspect of the welfare state. The recognition of inheritance and natural inequalities among races as well as among individuals knocks the props out from under the welfare state system.
    But, when all is said and done, the truth about race and IQ means a lot more to liberals and to neocons than it does to paleos. For the liberals and neocons, being statist to the core, are obliged to seize control of resources and to allocate them somehow among the various groups of the population. Liberals-neocons are "sorters," they aim to sort people out, to subsidize here, to control and restrict there. So, to the neocon or liberal power elite, ethnic or racial science is a big thing because it tells these sorters who exactly they should subsidize, who they should control, who they should restrict and limit. Should they use taxpayer funds to subsidize the "disadvantaged" or geniuses? Which is more socially productive, which dysgenic? I remember the only time I ever met neocon Godfather Irving Kristol; it was many years ago, at a conference critical of egalitarianism in Switzerland. It did not take long before the two of us got into a bitter argument because Kristol wanted geniuses declared a "national resource"; I hotly commented that such a declaration implied (a) that taxpayers should be forced to subsidize geniuses as "national resources"; and (b) that it followed that these subsidized would then be subject to government control. Kristol, as I remember, never denied such implications.
    But while neocons and liberals want the planners and national statists to sort, subsidize, and control, for which they need scientific data such as intelligence as guides, paleos are very different. Paleos believe in Liberty; paleos believe in the rights of person and property; paleos want no government subsidizers or controllers. Paleos want Big Government off all of our backs, be we smart or dumb, black, brown or white.
    It is truly fascinating that, while liberals and neocons have been deriding paleos for years as notorious "racists," "fascists," "sexists," and all the rest, that actually we, as libertarians, are the last group who deserve such a label: that, in fact, liberals and neocons, as people who all stand with the power elite over the ordinary Americans, are far more deserving of the statist-racist-fascist label.
    SO: WHY TALK ABOUT RACE AT ALL? If, then, the Race Question is really a problem for statists and not for paleos, why should we talk about the race matter at all? Why should it be a political concern for us; why not leave the issue entirely to the scientists?
    Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and "discriminatory" and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.
    In any case, there is cause for jubilation these days, for it looks as if the left-egalitarian blackout-and-smear gang has been dealt a truly lethal blow.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20121019150736/http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/ir/Ch75.html

    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  12. #10
    "My economic model will work if we implement it globally"

    Where have I heard that before?
    In New Zealand:
    The Coastguard is a Charity
    Air Traffic Control is a private company run on user fees
    The DMV is a private non-profit
    Rescue helicopters and ambulances are operated by charities and are plastered with corporate logos
    The agriculture industry has zero subsidies
    5% of the national vote, gets you 5 seats in Parliament
    A tax return has 4 fields
    Business licenses aren't a thing
    Prostitution is legal
    We have a constitutional right to refuse any type of medical care

  13. #11
    bump
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by idiom View Post
    "My economic model will work if we implement it globally"

    Where have I heard that before?
    Have you actually read Mises and Rothbard on Praxaeology and economics? When Austrians say things along the lines of that^^, they are being descriptive using real science. When Marxians say that, they're being prescriptive.
    Quote Originally Posted by Torchbearer
    what works can never be discussed online. there is only one language the government understands, and until the people start speaking it by the magazine full... things will remain the same.
    Hear/buy my music here "government is the enemy of liberty"-RP Support me on Patreon here Ephesians 6:12

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Bump
    Repetition is the essence of learning.

    Quote Originally Posted by r3volution 3.0 View Post
    I don't know that Salerno's characterization of Mises' position is altogether correct, but I'll go ahead and address what was said:

    ...

    This was and is a common misconception. Liberalism was born under the Old Regime, well prior to 1789. Nationalism and democracy were (along with socialism) the children of the revolution. The 19th century nationalists and democrats (and also the socialists) merely used the language of liberalism to advance their own causes (e.g. the "liberty" of the nation to govern itself, which has no bearing on the individual liberties valued by liberalism). The practical effect of the rise of nationalism and democracy (and obviously socialism) was to retard and ultimately reverse the progress of liberalism. Consider that modern "liberals" (i.e. socialists who've co-opted the term) also applaud the 19th century nationalists and democrats. Why? Because those 19th century nationalists and democrats really were the progenitors of modern "liberalism," while being the gravediggers of genuine liberalism.

    ...

    I don't recall ever hearing anyone (libertarian or otherwise) deny that nations exist. The issue isn't whether they exist but whether their existence has any moral implications: i.e. whether nations have rights that supersede individual rights. Similarly, that a libertarian rejects Marxist class theory doesn't mean that he denies that classes exist; he denies only that this has the implications that the Marxists claim).

    ...

    National conflict intensified with the advent of democracy (indeed, the Habsburg's own nationalities problem was, in the first place, largely a result of partial democratization in the mid 19th century), but this is an argument against democracy, not an argument for more nationalism. Likewise with Mises' discussion of the schools, police, and other state institutions as weapons in the hands of nationalist partisans. The nationally homogeneous state which Mises is proposing is meant as a solution to a problem created by democracy. This only begs the question; why have democracy at all?

  16. #14
    Bump
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  17. #15
    bump
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  18. #16
    Bump
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment



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