For clarity: I wasn't attempting a sort of "It's the Current Year" argument, though in retrospect it probably looks a lot like that. I'm more trying to make an observation about the culture we're in and the cultures that Marx, Von Mises and Rothbard et. al. were writing for. To wit, they're very different, and any method of dealing with our present malaise in the West has to take that into account - unless, as said, we bomb or spend ourselves back to the 1940s or so.
Marx wrote for the mid-19th century: Class was still a real and distinct thing, God was under serious challenge as a concept, and not a lot of industrialisation was mechanised, thus resulting in a large workforce of low-paid, uneducated workers who could be hammered into a compliant uprising at the hands of Lenin and similar. Of course Marxism was going to be popular: it promised power to the powerless, "fairness" to people who had been browbeaten into believing there was no fairness in the afterlife. In our time, it's primarily the free shit aspect that is most liked, because the idea of a social contract is fading.
Von Mises and Rothbard were late 19th, early 20th century thinkers. (I should be plain that there are certainly elements of their theories that seem to hold up and which they seem to be right about: their ideas about fiat money, for example, when it comes to government seem to match, again and again, the historical record.) But their ideas didn't get much play back in class-scarred, battle-scarred Europe: no, for their ideas about prosperity and small government to work, they had to export them to a culture which was (a) prosperous, especially after World War Two because its mainland hadn't been bombed into oblivion and (b) was at least theoretically inclined towards small government, until FDR had finished his work and shot the idea of US small government right between the eyes.
What I'm saying is that, even though their work may have had important truths about economics to render, they were still shaped by and writing for cultures that were particular to them to a large extent. They had default assumptions about their audiences: you can't build an economic theory unless you have a default idea about how the individual is going to behave, economically. The problem for us is that our culture and technology are evolving too quickly.
Yes, you can still absorb useful insights from them, in the same way that the West has absorbed exceedingly valuable insights about democracy and philosophy from the ancient Athenian culture. But there are large tracts of that culture which are, simply put, foreign if not getting on alien to our present culture. Technology and cultural change are moving with incredible speed in our own time; people respond with genuine incredulity about some of the ideas in the 1950s, for Christ's sake, only 70 years back.
As I often do, I'd leave the last comment to The Last Psychiatrist. When asked why he focuses so much on narcissism, he provides this:
Q. Describe the march of history over the past 100 years.
A. Fascism, then Marxism, then narcissism.
Q. What distinguishes the three?
A. Technology.
Q. What followed fascism?
A. War.
Q. What followed Marxism?
A. War.
Marx wrote for the mid-19th century: Class was still a real and distinct thing, God was under serious challenge as a concept, and not a lot of industrialisation was mechanised, thus resulting in a large workforce of low-paid, uneducated workers who could be hammered into a compliant uprising at the hands of Lenin and similar. Of course Marxism was going to be popular: it promised power to the powerless, "fairness" to people who had been browbeaten into believing there was no fairness in the afterlife. In our time, it's primarily the free shit aspect that is most liked, because the idea of a social contract is fading.
Von Mises and Rothbard were late 19th, early 20th century thinkers. (I should be plain that there are certainly elements of their theories that seem to hold up and which they seem to be right about: their ideas about fiat money, for example, when it comes to government seem to match, again and again, the historical record.) But their ideas didn't get much play back in class-scarred, battle-scarred Europe: no, for their ideas about prosperity and small government to work, they had to export them to a culture which was (a) prosperous, especially after World War Two because its mainland hadn't been bombed into oblivion and (b) was at least theoretically inclined towards small government, until FDR had finished his work and shot the idea of US small government right between the eyes.
What I'm saying is that, even though their work may have had important truths about economics to render, they were still shaped by and writing for cultures that were particular to them to a large extent. They had default assumptions about their audiences: you can't build an economic theory unless you have a default idea about how the individual is going to behave, economically. The problem for us is that our culture and technology are evolving too quickly.
Yes, you can still absorb useful insights from them, in the same way that the West has absorbed exceedingly valuable insights about democracy and philosophy from the ancient Athenian culture. But there are large tracts of that culture which are, simply put, foreign if not getting on alien to our present culture. Technology and cultural change are moving with incredible speed in our own time; people respond with genuine incredulity about some of the ideas in the 1950s, for Christ's sake, only 70 years back.
As I often do, I'd leave the last comment to The Last Psychiatrist. When asked why he focuses so much on narcissism, he provides this:
Q. Describe the march of history over the past 100 years.
A. Fascism, then Marxism, then narcissism.
Q. What distinguishes the three?
A. Technology.
Q. What followed fascism?
A. War.
Q. What followed Marxism?
A. War.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm
