Our Prospects Are Bright

This talk was delivered at the Boston Mises Circle on October 1, 2016.

Last week marked the 135th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, and that’s an appropriate moment to revisit Guido Hulsmann’s brilliant biography of this great man, Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism. I commend this book to you, incidentally, not simply for its profile of a seminal figure, but also as an outstanding work of intellectual history that incidentally offers the reader a graduate course in the history of economic thought.

As I reread the concluding sections, I was struck by the difference in temperament between Mises and Murray N. Rothbard, his great seminar student for more than 10 years, at least in terms of their outlooks on our prospects. Murray became known for his long-term optimism. Mises, not so much.

Over the course of the 1950s, for example, George Reisman, one of four students to earn his Ph.D. under Mises, thought he was seeing progress: more and more people he encountered seemed sympathetic to the cause of free markets. Mises was less sanguine: Reisman, he said, was a young man in the process of meeting existing supporters of free enterprise. There was no growth occurring.

And frankly, libertarianism is something new under the sun. It’s true, of course, that we have intellectual forerunners: the nineteenth-century individualist anarchists, the French liberals like Frederic Bastiat, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists like John Locke, and groups like the Levellers and the Late Scholastics, at the very least.

But a consistent and systematic approach to the world that takes liberty as its non-negotiable foundation? There frankly was no such thing until the twentieth century. Even the heroic figures who came before us, with the occasional exception like Gustave de Molinari, did not consider the possibility that so many state functions they took for granted could be provided within the market nexus they otherwise admired.

For a brand new philosophical school, and one that most people encounter only in caricature at the hands of media, intellectuals, and political figures who despise it, we’re doing extremely well.

Our views are the opposite of what the ruling classes want to hear, and the opposite of the superstitions those classes labor to spread among the public.

There are millions of us now. We have a greater ability to reach and educate people than ever before, and thereby increase our numbers still more.

Libertarians of the future will look back on this period in history and wonder why so many of us were so glum. This was when the explosion in growth occurred, and we were too busy comparing ourselves to Democrats and Republicans to see it.

As libertarians we know that a lot of news the public thinks is good is actually not so good, whether it’s the passage of destructive legislation with pleasant-sounding names, or economic news that sounds positive but in fact indicates bubble conditions. We are skilled at finding hard truths beneath the saccharine surface of state propaganda.

But when it comes to the growth of our movement and the spread of our ideas, by any reasonable standard the news is all good. Let’s recognize that, and build on it.

The post Our Prospects Are Bright appeared first on LewRockwell.