How Austrian Economists Repeatedly Saved Civilization
Founder of the Austrian School of economics, Carl Menger, some of his most famous intellectual descendants like Ludwig von Mises, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek, and author of the best-selling Economics in One Lesson Henry Hazlitt could be said to have literally saved civilization via their educational efforts on multiple occasions.
Until the late 1700s, most people lived in small, nearly self-sufficient farming towns. As technology improved (engines and factories) the rate at which mankind could transform raw materials into wealth was rapidly increasing in cities. A growing class of businessmen-entrepreneurs-capitalists were constantly innovating and due to people’s ‘freedom to trade’ their private property only for things they deemed superior alternatives, entrepreneurs also had to copy the innovations of competitors thus inadvertently creating and spreading superior information, turning cities and eventually the entire planet into supercomputers that were constantly reordering mankind in increasingly productive and technologically advanced states.
Competition between increasingly wealthy and productive factories and entrepreneurs motivated them to pay increasing amounts of wealth for labor relative to what people could earn in farms causing people to move to cities, quickly leading to massively complex metropolises and steadily increasing living standards for everyone.
These changes—what we could refer to as the emergence or evolution of modern capitalism—were not the deliberate design of people, they were, as Carl Menger writes: “the unintended result of individual human efforts (pursuing individual interests) without a common will directed toward their establishment,” or, in the words of Adam Ferguson: “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”
Since these changes were unintended, their benefits were not widely understood. Ignorance of how competing private sector companies were the creators and spreaders of superior information and subsequent social order led to some common errors. Erroneously and resentfully seeing the growing fortunes of some entrepreneurs and investors as exploitation of laborers—among numerous other fallacies led to the rapid spread of a new erroneous ideology-mythology—socialism.
Misguided ideologues and resentful masses increasingly thought that private companies led to unfair differences in wealth and exploitation, and that abolishing them or having them managed by a competition-immune coercive bureaucracy of experts, in other words, the state or government or the “public sector” would be better for society. Naive intellectuals would describe these increasingly popular fallacies-myths in a manner that was bound to go viral and that is what sort of happened with Karl Marx and his bite-sized ‘Communist Manifesto’ where he famously writes: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
Without private property there are no competing—and thus, information-creating-and-spreading private sector—companies managed by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are incentivized to be wealthy
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
