Happy 128th Birthday, Ludwig von Mises!
Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises early in life adopted this motto, translated from the Latin phrase above: "Do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it." Today, we remember Mises' principled defense of liberty in the 20th Century against the encroachments of Marxist/Hegelian statism: its welfarism, warfarism, usurpations of power, and attacks on the institutions of the family, church, free markets, business, and civilized society.
Mises' legacy survives in part through the work of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the website of its founder, Lew Rockwell. I have personally been impacted greatly by the scholarship of R.J. Rushdoony, Gary North, and others within a movement of Christian reformation for the 21st Century. Although endeavoring to build their intellectual endeavors self-consciously and presuppositionally on the foundation of Scripture, these men credited Mises and his Austrian School adherents with supplying needed and useful scholarship in free market, anti-statist economic theory.
Ron Paul's movement to END THE FED is grounded self-consciously in the scholarship of the Austrian School, of which Mises is the unrivaled father. Mises' disciple Murray Rothbard, followed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Walter Block, and others of recent times, have steered the "Rothbardian" wing of the Austrian School (represented by the Mises Institute website) into full-fledged anarcho-capitalism. Nonetheless, Mises himself was not an anarchist and believed in a limited role for the civil government. His "Austrian School of Economics" followers, whether anarchist or "minarchist," stand unrivaled among economists as the only adherents to sound money and the abolition of counterfeiting, statist central banks, represented in our country by the FED.
We can be grateful for a principled defender of economic and political liberty against statism. May we self-consciously advance Mises' motto and example of proceeding boldly against evil. For Christians, evil is defined by Scripture as anything that challenges the supremacy and Lordship of Christ Jesus over all areas of life and thought. (See, for example, II Cor. 10:5 and Eph. 6:12.) We have a common enemy with Mises and the Austrian School in the idolatrous, power-usurping welfare-warfare state. We must rise up, not with carnal weapons, but with the mighty weapons of truth in our words and deeds.
posted by C.S. Hayden @ 10:52 PM
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