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Mises Wire Frank Shostak 05/02/2024 In our modern political culture, many people claim that profits are the outcome of some individuals exploiting other individuals. Hence, anyone who is seen trying to make profits is regarded as an enemy of society and must be stopped before inflicting damage. According to Henry Hazlitt, “The indignation shown by many people today at the mention of the very word profits indicates how little understanding there is of the vital function that profits play in our economy.” Furthermore, Hazlitt held,

Mises Wire Wanjiru Njoya 04/30/2024 The ideal of individual liberty is perennially under attack not only from socialists, as one might logically expect, but also from conservatives who regard individualism as a form of selfishness. The ordinary meaning of selfishness is “caring only about what you want or need without any thought for the needs or wishes of other people,” and many conservatives see this as a major contributing factor in social decline. The conservative British journalist Nick Timothy attributes many social ills to selfishness, arguing that “our society has become more about ‘me’ than ‘we’,” leading to higher rates of crime, antisocial behavior, and a ballooning welfare state as selfish people try to take as much as possible from the public purse while contributing little or nothing to it. This school of conservative thought regards “excessive individualism” or “hyperindividualism” as a cause of social decay. Its proponents fear that the me-me-me society is partly to blame for the decline of Western civilization and therefore argue that defending individual liberty will only fuel further societal breakdown. As the family continues to be undermined by public policy, books like #MeFirst! A Manifesto for Female Selfishness, which promote “self-worship” and advise women not to have children, are seen as the logical result of individualism. Individualism is often referred to in this context as “rampant individualism” or “atomistic individualism,” which is associated with unhappy outcomes such as increasing loneliness and depression. Attributing social dysfunction to individualism explains much of the hostility with which many conservatives regard Ayn Rand’s attempt to extol the virtues of what she called selfishness. A review of Nick Timothy’s Rebuilding One Nation offers an example: “Eighties libertarianism has been left sulking on the margins of conservative policymaking for important reasons, and Timothy is ruthless in pointing out its deficiencies: its reputation for selfish individualism (reading Ayn Rand, Timothy tells us, left him ‘cold’) . . . Timothy ventures that individualism has shallow historical roots.”

Mises Wire Octavio Bermudez 04/29/2024 Ludwig von Mises visited Argentina in June 1959 by invitation of Dr. Alberto Benegas Lynch. The lectures Mises delivered at the University of Buenos Aires are reproduced in the book Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow. As the title suggests, the economic knowledge transmitted by Mises was for both those days and for the future. Argentina in 1959 was in a recession, the Frondizi administration trying to cope with the terrible situation left by President Juan Domingo Peron (1946–55) and the military government that got him exiled. In his time, Peron turned the Argentinian economy into a command economy with massive price regulations, decapitalization that greatly damaged wages and infrastructure, nationalizations, inflation, foreign exchange control, and import and export restrictions (taxes and quantitative limitations) among a myriad of interventions. The military coup that ousted him from office had mixed views on how to conduct economic policy. There was somewhat of a consensus that policy should aim at recapitalization and lowered restrictions. The system of multiple exchange rates was removed, and the bank deposits that had previously been nationalized and moved to the central bank were given back to the private banks. Yet the military government intervened in finance and banking in other ways like determining interest rates and carrying out operations in the open market by buying or selling currency and absorption documents. The military government was neither worrying about inflation nor giving way to the free market. It did set back some “excesses” of the previous administration, but the general role of the state in the economy remained unchanged. At the end of 1958, elections were held, and Arturo Frondizi was elected president (with the help of Peron from abroad). The errors of Peron and the military government were fresh when Mises visited Argentina, and Frondizi was just starting his economic reforms of import substitution by foreign investment. To put it more clearly, imports were discouraged, and foreign investment was sought to replace what was being discouraged.