Video: Tho Bishop of the Mises Institute Says Economics Is Fundamentally a “Culture Issue”

[WisconsinLiberty]

Tho Bishop of the Mises Institute Says Economics Is Fundamentally a “Culture Issue”

The New American
March 14, 2022

Tho Bishop, a writer and editor at the Mises Institute, sits down with Alex Newman at CPAC 2022 to talk about economic issues.

Bishop discusses the Austrian School of economics and the free market, and explains the mechanism of “inflation” and how it benefits Big Banks, Big Tech, etc.

After emphasizing that, fundamentally, economics is a cultural issue, and reviewing how the current system subsidizes reckless, short-term behavior and punishes responsible citizens who think long-term, Bishop suggests several solutions to help get America back on track financially and back to sound money.

[ClaytonB]

Family household -> communism
Community -> mutualism
Pastoral nation -> feudalism
Industrial nation -> capitalism

I'm not "advocating" for any of these -isms but, rather, asserting that they are -- to a rough first-approximation -- descriptive of human organization at the given scales. The key word is "scale". You cannot have an industrialized nation that is not capitalist. You can take away the capitalism and "glide" for a little while in the illusion that you are still an industrial nation (mainly by just plundering the capital stock and handing it out to your political buddies) but you will very shortly no longer be industrialized. And to whatever extent you are able to keep industrialization afloat for the duration, it is only by acting out a living contradiction whereby you practice capitalism with your hands and feet, but deny it with your mouths. Which is what the Soviets did for many decades.

Too often, we discuss economy as though it's something that "we decide". As though we can "decide" whether to be this kind of economy or that kind of economy. On paper, sure, you can decide you are the Man in the Moon and that the Moon is made of green cheese. But that doesn't make it so. Rather, the structure of an economy emerges from the people that make it up. Yes, political actors have an enormous sway in the make-up and structure of the economy, but it is crucial to keep in mind that they cannot actually determine what sort of economy will pertain. This is just as true of a totalitarian dictatorship like North Korea as it is of the US. Even Kim Jong Un cannot simply wave a wand in Pyongyang and transform the North Korean economy. Rather, the constraints of the economy press upon all actors equally -- including political actors.

What we're really always talking about in code-speak when the topic of "the economy" arises, is seizing the assets of some, and reassigning those assets to others. (Also, slavery. But that's another topic to itself.) The idea is supposed to be that, if the political czar just had enough power of unilateral correction, he or she would be able to "set things right" and "keep the machine in balance." But the machine was already balanced to begin with. There is no need to correct the number of egg-laying hens in the economy or to increase rubber production by fiat. Such measures are always disguised as an attempt to "fix" something that's "wrong" in the economy, but underneath all the layers of excuses and flimsy rationales, there is only ever one, omnipresent motive: the czar redistributing assets from political outcasts to political favorites and pocketing a handsome handler's fee along the way (often, just seizing the whole jackpot as a fee.) All the heady talk of social welfare, the general good, "from each according to ability to each according to need", and so on, is nothing more than verbal camouflage for armed robbery.

The nature of an economy emerges from the nature of the people that make it up. A culture (people) made up of highway robbers and brigands will produce an economy that reflects their nature. A culture of people made up of honest, hard-working people with the divine light of God shining in them, will produce an economy that reflects that. And an economy which corrupts its money and its regulatory institutions is an economy that punishes the good and incentivizes evil. So it's a double-evil.

You cannot separate economy and culture. They are of a piece.