The architects of the West German economic “miracle"

Some Constructive Heresies of Wilhelm Röpke

by Joseph R. Stromberg 

Wilhelm Röpke was a pro-market liberal who helped found the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 along with F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Leonard Read. But he has some significant differences with Anglo-American classical liberals that are worth exploring.

Born in Schwarmstedt in northern Germany in 1899, Röpke came from a family of Lutheran ministers and medical doctors. After his time in World War I he studied law and economics and embarked on a career as an academic economist. A firm opponent of National Socialism, Röpke was forced to “retire” in late 1933 and left Germany. He taught briefly in Turkey before settling permanently in Switzerland, whose tough and sturdy bourgeoisie he came to admire.

The intellectual historian Razeen Sally notes that Röpke produced around 900 publications. His books include Economics of the Free Society (1937, 1963),International Economic Disintegration (1942), The Solution of the German Problem (1946), Civitas Humana (1948), The Social Crisis of Our Time (1950), International Order and Economic Integration (1959), and A Humane Economy (1960; see The Freeman’s review here ^[1]). In Germany, the Röpke Stiftung (Institute) keeps alive his work and memory.

Röpke was closely identified with Germany’s “Neo-Liberals” (or “Ordo liberals”), who included Walter Eucken, Alexander Rüstow, Alfred Müller-Armack, and Ludwig Erhard. Writing in the aftermath of Weimar and National Socialism, these men wanted competition and free price movement ensured by a strong State (more on this shortly). Favoring a social-market economy, they served as architects of the West German economic “miracle.” While Anglo-American liberals claimed to be aggregating and balancing interests, German Neo-Liberals wanted an honest (and rather rational Hegelian) civil service to establish and preserve free competition. Seeing “planless” State intervention in aid of organized interests as the key problem, Neo-Liberals wished to block the influence of private “social power” over State policy and foster the common good.

For conservative economist William Campbell, Röpke was a Protestant thinker in the line of Erasmus and Grotius, despite his adoption of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. His work displayed distributist and radical Jeffersonian themes along with a dislike of entrenched aristocracies, and he distrusted what Campbell called “scientistic approaches to the production process,” such as Taylorism.

Röpke’s work in technical economics bore considerable resemblance to that of the Austrian school. Believing strongly in the market mechanism and free price movement, Röpke was nevertheless quite critical of modern business practices, corporations, advertising, and more. As he wrote in 1958, “[A]ctually existing forms of market economy . . . are a far cry from the assumptions of theory.” Social conditions shape outcomes “beyond supply and demand.” In 1929-30 Röpke argued that once a depression is under way, modest “reflation” to stimulate new demand may be called for. This argument for compensatory credit expansion can hardly be rejected out of hand—despite a partial agreement with Keynes—and a number of Austrian economists have taken a similar position. (Certainly he later rejected Keynesian methods as a normal part of State fiscal policy.)

One of Röpke’s central concerns was restoration of the world market crippled by World War I. Economically the world before 1914 had been “virtually a unit.” Customs duties were “merely data,” and there were no “raw materials” problems. The “gold standard was a working fiction of a real ‘world money’” with London at its center. In its heyday this order had promoted social and international peace. Pre-war protectionism had, however, fostered domestic monopoly, but Röpke lost little sleep over the modest tariffs of a bygone age. Instead, it was heavy State involvement in national economies (national corporatism) during World War I and between the world wars that concerned him.

The old trading system had not been a self-sustaining natural order but had had an “extra-economic . . . framework of moral, political, legal and institutional conditions.” Röpke’s views on international trade—“liberalism from below” by agreement of independent nations—appear to conflict with the current American top-down globalization model, even if Röpke showed some affection for the Pax Britannica. Under reasonably free trade there would be no special problems of “raw materials” and “living space,” and business as such was not the source of imperialism. Instead, States were the key promoters of monopoly, and if monopoly led to empire, State policy remained the most important cause.

While opposed to national corporatism, Röpke was perhaps insufficiently critical of the post-1945 (and U.S.-led) multilateral corporatism (“embedded liberalism”) of GATT and the ITO. On the other hand, he criticized exported U.S. inflation from the late 1950s onward and generally frowned on the top-down economic management of the Common Market, ancestor of the European Union.

Reflecting in 1946 on the disastrous course of German history in his Solution of the German Problem, Röpke applied his historical and economic ideas to the renewal of German political and economic life. As he saw it, a proper federal equilibrium had never existed in Germany. In late-medieval and early modern times, communal (town-based) decentralization succumbed to powerful feudal magnates making the transition to absolutism and bureaucratic management (“state feudalism”). On the land in western Germany free peasants emerged; to the east in Prussia “feudal” magnates successfully suppressed the peasantry. This dualism of agrarian structure persisted into recent times. Prussia’s underdeveloped cities posed no counterweight to the East-Elbian landed aristocracy (Junkers), and the factory-like Prussian state made society rational, mechanical, and clock-bound—whence inhuman Kantian “ethics” and the Prussian “cult of the colossal.”

German unification had been less organic than that of Italy. The new central state (from 1871) dominated by Prussia adopted elements of economic liberalism and abandoned them as needed. Here was a top-down social revolution involving proletarianization, population increase, mass conscription, State education, and the rise of atomized mass society. Subsidized, cartelized, hierarchical, and centralized as it was, German capitalism was “the prototype of monopoly-and-proletariat capitalism . . . of rigidly organized industry” looking toward “organized socialism” (italics in original).

The ideal political revolution would have constrained Prussian domination, while the ideal “economic and social revolution” would have required “agrarian reform breaking up the great estates and putting peasant farms in their place,” and tariff abolition to undermine industrial cartels. Interestingly, important Social Democrats opposed agrarian reform as necessarily backward and unprogressive.

Now—in 1946—something positive could be done about German agrarian and industrial “feudalism” and their attendant evils. Ideally, a new German revolution—sponsored by the Allies—would dissolve Bismarck’s imperial edifice in favor of the Länder (states). Local administration had survived the collapse of the National Socialist state, and the Allies could revive the constituent German states by negotiating a separate peace with each one, effectively dissolving the Reich. The Allies, Röpke thought, should also enforce “complete free trade, external and internal, for all these German states” to assure German economic viability in spite of political decentralization, thereby preventing the persistent poverty envisioned in the punitive Morgenthau Plan. Allied-enforced free trade would undermine the old order of cartels. As to Germany’s new political structure, a working compromise between a Staatenbund (confederacy) and a Bundesstaat (federal state—in the unfortunate American sense) would be required.

Röpke’s treatment of the German case reflected a broad historical vision. He spied a “plutocratic taint” in early capitalism and wrote that historical (and actually existing) capitalism featured “monopolies, mammoth industries, stock corporations, holding companies, mass production, proletariat,” and was thus “very misshapen” indeed. (This line of analysis parallels that of Franz Oppenheimer, who was a direct influence on Albert Jay Nock, Rüstow, and Röpke.)

The “feudal-absolutist heritage” resulted in “immense accretions of capital and economic positions of power which endow capitalism with that plutocratic taint which clings to it”—giving it “a false start from the very beginning.” But “violent contrasts between rich and poor, between power and impotence, are rather due to extra-economic (‘sociological’) positions of power” such as “feudal land holding . . . profits from the slave trade . . . war and speculative profits . . . pirates’ and soldiers’ booty, monopoly, concessions granted in the age of absolutism, plantation dividends, and railroad subsidies.” Such things were the basis of later “development.” Some were now gone; some, like “feudal mining properties,” lingered as “strongholds of robber barons. . . .” Thence came the odium unjustly extended to all market activity. As for that emblematic nineteenth-century investment—railroads—they had been premature and inflationary.

Consistent with this approach, Röpke found mass society and proletarianization central to the twentieth-century crisis. And where had proletarians come from? His answer: Political power made them, even if their numbers (population) increased later. In both eastern Germany and England (especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) dispossession of peasants created a reservoir of cheap industrial labor. In Röpke’s opinion, Capitalism and the Historians (1954), a book on the Industrial Revolution edited by Hayek, swung “too far the other way,” but could not dispose of proletarians—whatever their caloric intake may have been—and the social “catastrophe” that came with them.

Such phenomena had feudal-absolutist causes in Europe—but why then did we see much the same results in the United States? Here Röpke refers to Oppenheimer’s “political means” to wealth. The State, whether feudal-absolutist or not, made possible interest-group politics, and American democracy had long allowed “vested interests to flourish unchecked.” Indeed, the interpenetration of interests and bureaucracies “has probably reached its highest degree in the United States”! For Röpke the underlying cause of the evil was “the division of labor, pushed to extremes, and interlocking everything in the most complicated manner”—an unnecessary result since division of labor could in fact be “more humane and natural, and less mechanical and proletarian.”

Röpke announced his “Third Way” revisionist liberalism as early as 1941 in the Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, calling for the restoration of competitive markets and distinguishing good economic intervention from bad. He contrasted the industrial division of labor—within a firm or factory—with the social division of labor in which markets coordinate “activities of independent units.” Real, functional independence was what distinguished market economies from socialism, while excessive division of labor led “increasingly to mechanization [and] monotonous uniformity.” The obvious antidote for Röpke was widespread ownership of productive assets: deproletarianization through small property. Where possible, the realm of self-provision outside the market should be expanded and competition enforced.

On Röpke’s rather institutionalist view, State and economy are not and cannot be entirely separated except for purposes of analysis. As noted, he—like other German Neo-Liberals—saw interest-group liberalism as false pluralism: “Unhealthy pluralism . . . is not defensive but offensive. It does not limit the power of the state but tries to use it for its own purposes and make it subservient to these purposes.” Here then is a kind of socially conscious liberal cameralism as opposed to corporate syndicalism.

The false or unhealthy market economy rested on “legal forms and institutions”—“stock companies, the corporation, patent law, bankruptcy,” trusts, and so on, supported by legislation. Indeed, “the growth of the corporation with its much discussed but unfortunately too seldom remedied abuses has led more and more to the assumption of risk by the community.” The State’s job was to defend competition and refrain from favoring monopoly.

Röpke favored free movement of prices rather than a command economy, but insisted on a suitable legal-social framework, in stark contrast to the kind of liberal who imagines that private property and free price movement themselves constitute a social order. To achieve such fit legal foundations, Röpke suggested the need to overhaul laws dealing with bankruptcy, corporations, patents, money and banking, and antitrust. He saw economic concentration as being in particular the product of company law and tax policy. The low birthrate of new firms (as of 1960) surely reflected “something fundamentally wrong with the capital market and the tax system.”

For Röpke the best counterweight to the State was “the minimum economic independence for the individual which in turn is based on a minimum amount of property, economic freedom and security of existence.” Only a market economy could produce favorable outcomes—but what kind of market economy? Real independence was “jeopardized by proletarianisation, by concentration of private economic power, by increasing organization and monopoly, by cartels and associations, by agglomerations of financial interests, by corporativism, by the private planning of vested interests, in short by ‘business collectivism’”—which resembled (at best) a kind of feudal-authoritarian decentralization. The market required mutual trust, long-run legal stability, an ethic, as well as “certain psychological-moral reserves.” The economy was not “an autonomous sphere of rational behavior,” and philosopher Max Scheler (an important influence on Pope John Paul II) had shown that “contractual cooperation of men . . . cannot work without genuine communities.”

Röpke insisted that free markets require a moral framework outside themselves in order to work optimally. The market is only defensible “as part of a wider general order encompassing ethics, law, the natural conditions of life and happiness, the state, politics, and power.”

Röpke could perhaps be seen as wanting precisely the combination of “free market and strong State” some writers associate with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. But in that model (also called “neo-liberal”) the strong State pursues a two-pronged strategy of “starving” the welfare beast while feeding the military-industrial one—the latter being (beyond controversy) a great den of special interests. Empirically, then, it appears that the Thatcher-Reagan regimes involved the triumph of new political coalitions working—free-market rhetoric notwithstanding—wholly within the logic of interest-group liberalism. (Financial magicians might also be mentioned.)

In Röpke’s Neo-Liberalism the State is “strong” in an ethical and not just a structural sense and is therefore able to resist special-interest pressures, whatever their ideological coloration. It is of course nearly impossible for Americans to believe that a neutral and ethical civil service can exist (or ever has existed) anywhere. But as John Taylor of Caroline, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Röpke have suggested, republican forms of government are the special prey of well-organized, rent-seeking interests.

Liberal and Libertarian Constructs

But, alas, Röpke frequently mentioned “regulation” and even “planning.” Here acquired reflexes will inevitably kick in, with sundry classical liberals shouting “statism” in a crowded tea party. But does Röpke’s model really differ so much from certain liberal-to-libertarian constructs? Let us consider some of those. In the educational model associated with F. A. Hayek, dedicated scholars put in decades of work, eventually turning the tide of public opinion, whereupon the State relents and gives us free markets. This plan is as old as the Physiocrats’ idea of persuading an absolute monarch to impose their vision of free internal markets on all of France. A good idea, no doubt, but it was the State that would do the imposing.

Next comes the model in which a libertarian legal code solves all our problems. All we need do is have a revolution of some sort. In one variant a kind of Patriot King will rally the masses behind a right-wing populist agenda. This “libertarian” man on horseback will then dismantle the State and give up his own (State-like?) power when his State-smashing frenzy is over. The law code being in place, we are asked to believe that thenceforward individual contracts undertaken in a complete ethical vacuum will constitute society.

(This version does not have probable success written all over it.)

So here we arrive at some common paradoxes of libertarian policy-making. Everyone concerned wants a government of laws and not of men, but this unlikely outcome demands some automatic mechanism to replace the fallible men. Have we ever seen such a mechanism? In practice it seems, everyone wants the State, or some suitably stateless-looking substitute for the State, to impose his or her program. On balance, Röpke’s ideal of a genuinely neutral and ethical civil service with a limited agenda subordinated to the common good does not seem more utopian than the proposals just sketched.

Institutions and Culture

Röpke’s Third Way, with its revision of liberalism and its slight tilt toward distributism and agrarianism, has the virtue of foregrounding issues of economic sociology, institutions, and culture, which everyday classical liberalism and libertarianism contrive to ignore. His specific insights and themes—however radical-reactionary and Romantic they may seem—ought to be of interest to all who see a need to combine the insight that markets are very useful with “thicker” social theory able to take account of community, shared values, and nonmaterial interests. Front Porch communitarians, “civic republicans,” left libertarians, conservatives, and many others might do well to revisit Röpke from time to time.

Perhaps Röpke was mistaken in thinking that, absent his ideal ethical and neutral State, people surrounded by “thin” markets could not generate essential “thick” (intermediate) social-cultural relationships. If he was wrong, then arguably it is naturally generated thick libertarianism that would in fact be the true Third Way. Röpke’s own experience, however, convinced him that non-neutral States and capitalism (in a negative sense here), working in tandem, had done so much damage (as in Germany)—and for so long—that it would be idle to rely on society to reconstitute itself in the short run.

The Power of Ideas

Ideas versus Interests

by Isaac M. Morehouse 

One of my favorite quotes about the power of ideas comes from Ludwig von Mises in Human Action: 

“What determines the course of a nation’s economic policies is always the economic ideas held by public opinion. No government whether democratic or dictatorial can free itself from the sway of the generally accepted ideology.”

This is a rather extreme statement. Are governments really so tightly bound by the beliefs of the public? Anyone versed in Public Choice theory is likely to find Mises’s statement a bit much. After all, Public Choice demonstrates how incentive structures in the political system can lead to policies that are not in fact favored by the majority of citizens but are in the interest of a powerful few.

Public Choice analysis is incredibly useful to economists and laypeople alike. It has opened our eyes to the difficulty of government reaching its own stated ends because of incentive problems within the system of government itself. It has dispelled the myth that government ineptitude is simply the result of bad leaders. However, in all this emphasis on incentives and interests, Public Choice often overlooks or minimizes the role of ideas.

We cannot forget the power of ideas to overcome the bad incentives inherent in any system of government and to act as a roadblock to the seemingly inevitable expansion of State power.

Consider a rather silly example that illustrates the inability of Public Choice alone to explain the world of policies in which we live.

A billboard says, “Kicking chickens creates prosperity.”

This is part of a campaign sponsored by the Partnership for a Chicken-Free America. The group is made up of people who have an extreme dislike for chickens, and they are willing to put vast resources into reducing the well-being of such fowl. In fact, they advocate legislation to establish national Kick-A-Chick Day.

Most voters and members of the general public do not share this distaste for chickens. Then, again, most people are relatively indifferent when it comes to chicken happiness. With a few exceptions, it is not in an individual’s interest to spend resources on a counter-campaign or to hire lobbyists to oppose the Kick-A-Chick bill; the costs of doing so simply outweigh the benefits.

This is a classic case of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. The anti-chicken people derive tremendous happiness from harming chickens, making their campaign a worthwhile expenditure. Yet the general public gains little from preventing chicken kicking, and the cost of opposing it is very high.

On the other hand, the public loves prosperity. If they believed that punting hens created wealth, there is little reason to suspect they would not support the policy. A public-awareness campaign would be just the ticket.

Armed with Public Choice theory we can see the sad but likely result. The chicken-free association will exert its influence and get its bill. The public will either support what they believe to be a prosperity-creating policy or ignore it altogether because the cost of fighting is too high. The interests align in such a way that we can expect the anti-bird forces to get their way.

Of course this story is absurd and such a law would never be introduced, let alone pass. What makes it so obviously impossible?

Ideas.

People know there is no causal connection between kicking a chicken and enjoying a higher standard of living. That knowledge makes the campaign laughable. Regardless of how the interests are aligned, if people are educated enough to know that chicken kicking does not equal prosperity, such an absurd policy will not be enacted.

Ideas and Public Opinion

This was an admittedly silly example. You could claim that the real reason such a stupid policy wouldn’t fly is not public opinion, but the fact that no real interest group would advocate for kicking chickens. But it is not hard to imagine other instances where a real interest would benefit from marketing a false cause-and-effect relationship, but where they simply cannot because the public knows enough not to buy it. Hotdog producers would gain if the consumption of one frankfurter per day were required by government. Why don’t they promote such a law? They could run ads saying, “If you eat a hotdog, a child will be cured of cancer.” It is not hard to see that, real or imagined, interest groups cannot get away with everything, even in the face of bad incentives.

Yesterday I saw a sign on the side of a bus that I found no less absurd than the chicken-kickers campaign. It read, “Converting buses creates jobs. What are we waiting for?” The ad was sponsored by a “clean air” association, no doubt consisting of members of the natural-gas industry and people for whom a reduction in fossil fuel use would bring some great personal pleasure.

Just like our chicken story, the incentives are aligned so that the benefits of bus-conversion mandates to the members of this small group exceed the cost of their advocacy efforts, while the benefits to individual citizens of stopping the mandates fall short of the cost of opposition. As far as incentives go, the situation seems pretty dire.

Unlike our chicken story, however, most people do not know there is no magical or “free” job creation when government mandates bus conversions. The resources used to convert the buses must be taken from somewhere, and it is as likely as not that there are many other jobs destroyed or never created in the first place when the resources are redirected. Furthermore, most people do not know that there is no causal connection between more jobs and more prosperity, or a higher standard of living. In fact, if a government mandate creates jobs, it is likely that it does so precisely because it is destroying wealth by moving it from more-productive to less-productive (and more labor intensive) uses.

This lack of knowledge is actually good news.

It means things are not as hopeless as pure Public Choice theory might suggest. Bad incentives can be overcome by good ideas. In our chicken story it was clear that interests alone were insufficient to enact policy. Knowledge of the policy’s incoherence trumped the incentive structure. With a grasp of basic economics, people may find the sign on the bus just as laughable as the idea of Kick-A-Chick Day.

Special interests can only appeal to things within the realm of accepted public opinion, which is shaped by public knowledge. We can affect public knowledge.

Special interests can do much to destroy liberty given the incentive structure in our political system. Indeed, with an ignorant populace there is little they cannot do. But even the most powerful interests ultimately answer to the ideas held by a majority of citizens. Policy follows the path blazed by belief.

In emphasizing the role of ideas in limiting the expansion of the State or the power of special interests I do not mean to say Public Choice is incorrect. It is a valuable toolkit that brings a dose of realism to our efforts at reforming the State. But it is most powerful when it recognizes and incorporates the power of ideas to change and shape interests, and to help people put aside their short-term interests and understand their long-term interests.

It was recognition of the power of ideas over interests that motivated Leonard Read to start the Foundation for Economic Education. It is because of the power of ideas that FEE has tirelessly educated individuals on economic principles for these many years. It is because of the power of ideas that we must continue our educational efforts, no matter how frustrating it may sometimes be.

When we succeed, all interventionist interest groups and their ploys will be shown to be just as ridiculous as the Partnership for a Chicken-Free America. No matter how powerful an interest, how strong its incentives, or how corrupt the system, government can ultimately only do what people permit it to; and people will only permit it to do what they believe it capable of doing. Through education we can demonstrate just how incapable government is. In the end, despite the very real power of interests, ideas win.

To paraphrase Victor Hugo, “More powerful than an army of special interest lobbyists, is an idea whose time has come.”

The Wise and Good Vs the common people

Moderation in All Things

by Donald J. Boudreaux 

Aristotle wisely advised moderation in all things. Gluttons and fanatics self-destruct by refusing to make the tradeoffs necessary to lead a good life. “Don’t tell me that I can’t drink and carouse every night and not succeed in my career!” insists the fool. “I can have it all.”

Well, he can’t. No one can.

That’s the thing about tradeoffs. They’re unavoidable. If you don’t make your own tradeoffs, they will be made for you by nature, by chance, or by other people. And it’s a sure bet that when you abdicate your ability to choose how your tradeoffs are made, the ways that nature, chance, or other people make them for you will displease you.

As I read it, Aristotle’s counsel of moderation is no puritanical call for an austere life unadorned by intense sentiments, pleasures, and passions. Rather, he counsels personal responsibility and rationality in pursuing your sentiments, pleasures, and passions. You simply cannot enjoy limitless amounts of all the possible joys available in life. If you grasp unthinkingly at every pleasurable opportunity that passes your way, you will not be making choices. You will be reacting mindlessly. And your mindless pursuit of immediate pleasures will deny you access to other opportunities. You will enjoy fewer pleasures and much less happiness over the long haul than you would have enjoyed had you acted rationally.

Make whatever choices you wish, constrained only by your respect for the rights of others to make whatever choices they wish. But make your choices. Make them rationally and wisely. Your choices may differ substantially from mine. But as long as you choose your own tradeoffs rationally—without abdicating that responsibility to others or to fate—your prospects for a fulfilling life are promising.

The Aristotelian counsel of moderation is, thus, a plea to weigh tradeoffs mindfully. It has an important implication for public policy, which is this: true moderation (and its resulting happiness) is necessarily an individual pursuit and accomplishment. It cannot be achieved by a third party, whether that third party is a democratic majority or a dictator. The reason is that, in each instance, striking the right tradeoff requires assessing the relative merits of many different options in light of each person’s unique circumstances, opportunities, and aspirations.

Because you cannot know my preferences, hopes, history, and opportunities, and because I cannot know yours, neither of us is well equipped to make sound decisions for the other. Were I to attempt, even with excellent intentions, to make your choices for you, the result would not be moderation for you. The result would be immoderation. My inability to know your aspirations and circumstances inevitably would cause me to foist on you too much of some things and to deny you too much of others. Your life would be imbalanced.

Indeed, to the extent that you as an individual are stripped of your right to choose, you are stripped of humanity. Whether you believe that your capacity for rational thought is God-given or the exclusive product of natural selection, the fact is that you possess this capacity. Your capacity to think and to choose is who you are. Exercising it is what makes you an individual. The very concept of individuality is empty absent each person’s right to make his own life’s choices.

Some readers might respond with an “Of course. Who denies that freedom to choose is necessary both for human happiness and for the flourishing of individuality?” To this response I say: While many people pay lip service to this fact, too few really believe it.

Consider, for example, the demonization over the past several years of tobacco companies. This demonization occurred only because it is widely believed that people are mindless fools who lack sufficient capacity to judge and choose wisely. If people so lack the capacity to choose wisely that the mere sight of a cigarette jutting from the chiseled chin of a cowboy impels them to smoke, then a solid case might be made that tobacco companies are predators seizing profit from a fundamental human weakness—namely, an inability to choose and act wisely.

But if most of us truly believe both that people are capable of making their own choices wisely and that people’s freedom to choose ought not be throttled, then efforts to demonize tobacco companies would fail. It is today’s presumption that smokers are helpless dupes—that people are mere reactors rather than actors—that is the source of the current hostility toward smoking and tobacco companies. And it follows almost inevitably from this despairing view of humans-as-foolish-reactors that ordinary men and women must be protected from themselves by the Wise and the Good—or, at least, by those who fancy themselves anointed because they’ve achieved political power.

Of course, it’s true that even the most prudent amongst us sometimes make poor choices. It’s also true that some of us persistently react childishly rather than choose wisely. But one of the beauties of a society governed by the impartial rules of private property rights rather than by government dictates is that the consequences—good and bad—that fall on each decision-maker correspond closely to the consequences that these decisions have on others. If I produce a $200 computer that has all of the features and reliability of a model that costs $2,000, I prosper. If, in contrast, I use resources to produce chocolate-covered pickles, I lose money. Likewise, if I use my energy and time to acquire productive skills and knowledge, I prosper. If, in contrast, I squander my energy and time pursuing nothing other than my own immediate gratifications, I personally pay the price.

But when politics replaces freedom and personal responsibility, people who make poor decisions—for example, domestic producers who don’t invest as wisely as foreign firms—are often shielded from the consequences of their poor choices. Political favors enable such people to persist in their own immoderation, but only by taxing and regulating the rest of us in ways that compel us to support their immoderate behavior. In the end, society winds up with immoderately large amounts of the undesirable behavior protected by government and too little of the desirable behaviors necessary for a prosperous, free, and civil society.

To have moderation in all things requires freedom from immoderate government.

The Concrete Age of Soviet Planning

Prisoners in Camp Kim

   Strange, secretive, and desperately poor, North Korea tests the limits of social control.

BY PETER HITCHENS

Here is the locked ward of the political asylum, the place where politics has actually become an official state religion, and power is worshipped, directly and literally, in the form of a colossal bronze idol to which the people come and bow with every sign of reverence. Nothing in the modern world compares with North Korea, though it gives us some clue about how life must have been under the pharaohs, in Imperial Japan before Hiroshima, or in the obliterated years—conveniently erased from memory by blushing fellow travelers—when Josef Stalin was revered as a human god.

Pyongyang is the most carefully planned and also the most mysterious city on the planet. You cannot, unless you escape from the warders who accompany foreigners everywhere in North Korea, walk inquisitively along its surprisingly green and spacious streets. If you did, you would rapidly be apprehended and returned, amid fierce reprimands, to your tour bus or to the special hotel on an island in the Taedong River, where outsiders are comfortably but irksomely confined when they are not on supervised expeditions. But you can glimpse the shady, fenced-off streets where the elite live, close to the Russian Embassy from which subsidies used to pour in Soviet days.

You can gaze on the gargantuan housing estates, made up of scores of apartment blocks, a great festival of concrete outdoing even Soviet Moscow in its gigantism. You may admire the Juche Tower, which symbolizes North Korea’s supposed self-reliance. The tower is a column three feet taller than the Washington Monument, weirdly topped by a great simulated red flame, like a much larger version of the World War I Memorial in Kansas City, but only when there is enough power to keep it aglow. That is not always. Voltage is a problem in Pyongyang. The streetlamps are never switched on, and there is a strange interval between sundown and total darkness, before the lights start to come on in the windows of all the apartments. There is also a wonderful quiet, since Pyongyang has hardly any motor traffic by day and even less at night. Human voices can be heard from astonishing distances, as if you were in a tranquil lakeside resort rather than in the center of a grandiose metropolis. The electric current in homes and offices seems suspiciously feeble and shuts down abruptly when the government thinks bedtime has arrived. The authorities also have views on when you ought to wake up. A siren rouses the sluggards at 7 each morning, though light sleepers will already have been alerted to the approach of the working day by ghostly plinking, plonking music drifting from loudspeakers at 5 and 6 o’clock. The sensation of living in an enormous institution, part boarding school, part concentration camp, is greatly enhanced by the sound of these mass alarms.

I wondered what they reminded me of until it came to me that they resembled the Muslim call to prayer, wavering and throbbing across Islamic cities for the pre-dawn prayers. For while visitors may see this place as a prison, many of its inmates show every sign of regarding it as a shrine to the human god whose image they all wear on their clothes and whose various names cannot be pronounced without reverence: the Great Leader, Gen. Kim Il Sung. It is Kim, not Marx or Lenin, who is honored everywhere. In fact, the Communist nature of the regime is hardly ever stated, except in the hammer, sickle, and writing brush of the Korean Workers’ Party symbol.

If you are very lucky and honored, you may penetrate the Kumsusan Memorial Palace. This was the home of the Great Leader when he was ordinarily alive, kept going in his later years by a special diet of extra-long dog penises. Today, it is his mausoleum, where he lives forever in the extraordinary fashion devised for him by whoever actually controls this country. This is no mere Lenin’s Tomb but a temple of awe, where devotees must have the dust blasted from their clothes and shoes before approaching the sacred body and bowing deeply.

I was not considered worthy to go there, but was allowed to lay flowers at, and bow to, the bronze image of Kim that gleams on a hill above the city—and used to gleam a great deal more before the gold leaf that once adorned it was stripped off. It is widely believed that the extravagant coating was removed in one night after the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping remarked dryly that if North Korea could afford such a display, it surely did not really need the Chinese economic aid for which it was asking. As for the bow, I performed a perfunctory Episcopalian nod, inoffensive, polite, but far from effusive. One of the many advantages of an Anglican upbringing is that one has gestures for all occasions, including obeisance to the bronze images of unhinged tyrants—though I found myself strangely disturbed by and ashamed of this particular breach of the Commandments for some time afterward. As I laid the equally obligatory and hideous flowers, I silently assured myself that I was doing so in memory of Kim’s many victims. You may classify this as cowardice, and I will not necessarily disagree, but it seemed that I had accepted that I would have to kowtow to this cult the moment I decided to enter North Korea. What is more, I sensed that my guides and guards genuinely revered this thing and that it would be plain bad manners to refuse. 

Brooding over this morbid, idolatrous cityscape is a great pyramid, a thousand feet high. But this majestic structure is also a ruin, a grand project that was never finished and now never will be. Visitors are discouraged from asking about it. Guides prefer not to mention it, and more recent official publications do not contain pictures of it, though older ones do. It’s by far the tallest tower in Pyongyang, but its windows show no lamps by night, and it has no aircraft warning lights (a lower skyscraper does), so that if there ever were any air traffic over Pyongyang (there isn’t), it would pose a grave danger to night-flyers. It is, by coincidence, almost exactly the height and shape of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, though its purpose was more innocent—it was to be a hotel, taller than any other in the region. But something mysterious went wrong with the construction, and so it slowly crumbles, mocking with its hundreds of glassless windows the tongue that commanded its construction and the mind that conceived it. Nothing short of a nuclear explosion could remove it, but it is hard to believe that a nation that cannot even finish a grand hotel can really construct a workable atom bomb, as it claims to have done.

The main feeling the visitor has in Pyongyang is one of pity at the pathos of the place—its hopeless, helpless overestimate of its own power and importance, the deluded ignorance of millions of people carefully protected from any inrush of truth about themselves, their country, and their rulers. Every radio and TV set has been carefully

A role model for Greece

As Argentina Seizes Newsprint, Press Freedom Suffers

What's the oldest trick in the dictator's handbook? Why, to seize the newsprint. Fresh from a big electoral win, Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez has pulled that hoary stunt, topping even Hugo Chavez.

By a vote of 41-26, Argentina's Senate passed a law to nationalize all newsprint, of course in "the national interest."

In Argentina, a nation that still avidly reads newspapers and magazines, that's a lot of power. It effectively hands the government a monopoly on newsprint — since only one newsprint plant, Papel Prensa, remains.

By coincidence, it's owned by La Nacion and Clarin, two media groups Fernandez has pursued for years.

The Newsprint Bill represents "progress toward a free press," the government oozed.

It "will improve the quality of information and the plurality of opinions in Argentina," added Vice President Amadou Boudou.

Baloney. It's a blow to free speech that opens the door not just to self-censorship, which is already rampant in Argentina, but to ever-more fascistic state manipulation of the country's communities, businesses and industries, and violations of personal and property rights.

It's part of a long slide for the increasingly socialist nation. In a report last May, the Inter-American Press Association denounced the "constant harassment and intimidation of independent and critical journalists" in an attempt to "create self-censorship or simply attack them to destroy their credibility."

There are precedents for this.

In 1973, Chile's Marxist President Salvador Allende — a Fernandez hero — tried to seize newsprint, too, triggering a popular rebellion that led to his downfall. But to Fernandez, and the U.S. left, Allende remains a saint. That's why Fernandez feels free to copy him.

Sadly, this is happening because no one stands up for democracy in a region that still claims to be democratic. The Organization of American States is a nonentity, and the U.S. under the Obama administration still considers Argentina a major non-NATO ally.

Fernandez, in power for just two weeks, uses her large electoral victory as justifying her action.

But in reality, Argentina's opposition has been decimated and a one-party state remains. With no one left to fight, Fernandez is going after the press — in a way Allende and Hugo Chavez could only dream of.

Prague Autumn

The Czechs escaped Soviet domination only to face a new tyranny

by Peter Hitchens

For most of us, Prague is an idea before it is a city. Mention of the name calls up a series of monochrome images, most of them violent and distressing, boding little good for those involved. Imperial delegates are hurled from a high window into a dungheap and the Thirty Years War begins. Women weep as the German army tramps by in the March gloom. Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s personal favorite, is assassinated on a street corner (the first killer’s gun jams, but the second hurls a hand grenade), and hundreds have to die or suffer horribly in the furious retaliation. Jan Masaryk, a liberal who tried to work with Stalin, is pushed to his death from yet another window, his fingernails scrabbling on the sill as he discovers for certain that democracy is incompatible with Communism, or was it the other way round? Rudolf Slansky and Vlada Clementis, guilty of being Jewish at a time when Stalin was displeased with Jews, are hanged by their revolutionary comrades, swiftly cremated, and their ashes spitefully used to grit the snowy roads. Russian tanks crawl through sullen crowds, their crews puzzled because they had expected to be welcomed. The affronted people hold up signs, in good, grammatical Russian, saying politely, “Go Home.” When this fails, they try Molotov cocktails, and Jan Palach burns himself to death.

After too much of this, enormous peaceful multitudes demand and achieve the return of their lost liberty. It is a happy ending, though too late for several million people unlucky enough to live and die in all the unhappy eras. We have heard and read Prague’s name in ancient newsreels and history books. We know it as the scene of Franz Kafka’s hopeless Trial and perhaps as the home of the Good Soldier Schweik, who responds to authority by having another drink. Like Rome or Jerusalem, its name sounds in the mind like a bell or a snatch of music, plangent and melancholy.

So it is, in any case, for me. Prague the city is as mysterious and somber as you might expect, if not more so. Something about this dark bend on the Vltava River seems to attract melodrama and woe and inspire people to futile but admirable acts of resistance to historical inevitability.

I was advised to travel there more than three decades ago by someone who had been a courier for Stalin’s Comintern in the years before 1939. This wife of a prominent British labor union leader had carried messages to Moscow and gold to London, often passing through the Czech capital on her secret travels, lodged in the best hotels, clad in couture clothes and provided with the smartest luggage, for in those less egalitarian days rich voyagers attracted less attention from customs men than the shabby poor. Thanks to her continuing sympathies with the Soviet empire, she had been back since.

In those days, Eastern and Central Europe were barely visited by British people. They did not, she said, know what they were missing. “Go now,” she urged. “There is nowhere in Europe where you can still feel and see what the Continent was like before the Second World War.”

So it proved. There were no guidebooks or reliable street plans to be found. The official railroad map of Europe ended at the Iron Curtain. The booking clerks had to unearth special procedures to obtain our tickets. Our passports were sent off to Prague to be unstitched, reassembled, and photocopied by the Secret Police. But we persisted. The train, once it had crawled past the dragon’s teeth and barbed wire coils of the frontier, slowed to the pace of half a century ago. Through the somnolent afternoon, elderly waiters in the dining car served a weighty lunch of pork, dumplings, and beer as we wound past decayed spas and sad, dispossessed castles. We fell at last into the dark gravitational pull of Moscow, passing dispirited industrial cities hung with red banners and then, in the Prague suburbs, vast sidings full of Soviet rolling stock marked with the hammer and sickle. Then we were there.  

The stone crown of Central Europe was improbably lovely but also black and cold, unspoiled only because nobody could afford to spoil it, unbombed only because it had been handed over captive. Even so, it was all still there, though much of it was prevented from falling down only by large baulks of dirty timber jammed against sagging walls. It was full of genuine fear, something the Western visitor could selfishly enjoy, much as one enjoys a good ghost story because he knows that the evil is contained within secure borders. There were no tourists, only perplexed North Korean exchange students, their hair massacred in the style later indissolubly associated with Kim Jong Il, gaping at the sooty spires and mad, triumphalist Baroque churches of the Old Town. I even acquired a personal Secret Police escort, who took me out to meals and drove me around in the mistaken belief that I was more than I seemed to be and would somehow reveal myself if given enough Pilsner beer. I was approached on trams by sad men who thanked me (as if I were responsible) for the BBC Czech service, their only source of truth. I was approached in hotels by Anglophile black Cuban students who wanted to drink rum with an Englishman.

But Englishmen have a special difficulty with Prague, the place we merrily betrayed in 1938, hoping to save our own bacon by cooking the Czechs’ goose. In a way, we betrayed it again in 1948 and 1968, when we peaceably abided by the unspoken agreement that we could live as we pleased in Western Europe if we let the Russians do what they liked in the East.

I went back again and again while Prague languished under the stupid rule of the Communist Party, until the astonishing week when all that stopped. 

Then I didn’t return for almost 20 years. I could not quite bear to. After the impossible sweetness of November 1989, when the forces of good just for once appeared to triumph completely over the forces of wickedness, I thought it could never be any better. I was swept along the great streets in the snow, under icy blue skies, in a great triumphal festival of the newly liberated, and it seemed as if Christmas had arrived early.

I heard in the years afterward that it had not been quite so sweet, that the KGB themselves might have had a hand in the all-too-easy overthrow of Communism. It was even revealed that the student whose death we had all been protesting so righteously hadn’t actually died or even been seriously hurt. Vaclav Havel, like so many revolutionaries, gradually transformed himself from a tribune of liberty into a slightly tiresome figure of woolly, modish liberalism.

Parties of British youths, attracted by cheap beer, infested the ancient city, yelling and spewing among the monuments. The previously untouched facades began to wear the universal livery of global branding. Czechoslovakia itself fell apart. Both segments were gobbled up by the European Union.   

I went back, a little reluctantly, by the route Adolf Hitler liked to take from Berlin down to Dresden, now living proof that you can put the clock back, as its lovely domes and towers rise again from the wreckage of bombing and the grimy neglect of socialism. The journey is a poignant one, past the glum fortress towers of Pirna where the Third Reich pioneered the slaughter of the mentally handicapped (“we do it in the womb and so get away with it”) and then along the melodramatic gorge of the Elbe, not unlike the Potomac as seen from Harpers Ferry. Like Hitler, I had no need to pause at the Czech frontier. Along with all the borders of continental Europe, it has ceased to exist, smashed not by tanks but by the mighty decrees of the European Commission.

The Vienna Express roars on regardless, and the traveler must look closely at inn signs and such things to make out that he has passed from Germany into the Czech lands. Or has he? For this is the very Sudetenland that provided the pretext for the Munich crisis, in those days a German minority enclave in the invented state of Czechoslovakia. It is now ostensibly restored to Czech rule, but the Czech Republic is only a feeble vassal of the mighty European Union, which differs from all previous empires in not having an emperor—at least not yet.

Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito

Murray Rothbard and Third Parties

by R. Wenzel

As part of the recent attacks on Ron Paul, some have raised the point that attempts were made to reach out to various right wing groups. Murray Rothbard was probably influential with these attempted alliances, although I'm not sure how seriously he took them, himself. In addition to being a genius, making major contributions in economics, history, political philosophy and legal theory, he had a bug for third party politics.

At times, approaches to right wing groups were made, but Rothbard also once endorsed Norman Mailer for Mayor of New York City and at another time called for William Kunstler to be freed from jail.

Bottom line: Rothbard was all over the map, in Diogenes fashion. But instead of looking for an honest man, Rothbard was looking for a political party of some sort, where he could introduce a libertarian point and quench his thirst for third party activity.

Here's Rothbard's hilarious take on his infiltration of the Maoist wing of a Leninist-Trotskyite party: 

The peak of my political activity on the New Left came during the 1968 campaign. In the spring of 1968, my old enthusiasm for third party politics was rekindled, albeit in a different direction. The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) which had become (and still is) established in California, decided to go national, and opened up shop in New York. I found that the preliminary platform and the only requirement for membership contained only two planks: the first was immediate U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, and the second was some plank so vague about being nice to everyone that almost anyone, left, right, center could have endorsed it. Great: here was a coalition party dedicated only to immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and requiring no commitment whatever to statism! As a result, our entire libertarian group in New York poured happily into the new party.

The PFP was structured around clubs, most of them regional – such as the powerful West Side (of Manhattan) club, the hippie Greenwich Village Club, etc. One was occupational – a Faculty Club. Since there were very few actual faculty members in this very youthful party, the PFP generously widened the definition of "faculty" to include graduate students. Lo and behold! On that basis, of approximately 24 members in the Faculty Club, almost exactly one-half were our people: libertarians, including myself, Leonard Liggio, Joe Peden, Walter Block and his wife, Sherryl, and Larry Moss. The legislative arm of the PFP was to be the Delegate Assembly, consisting of delegates from the various clubs. The Faculty Club was entitled to two delegates, and so we naturally divvied it up: one going to the socialists, and one to us, who turned out to be me.

At the first meeting of the Delegate Assembly, then, here I was, only in the Party for about a week, but suddenly vaulted to top rank in the power elite. Then, early in the meeting, some people got up and advocated abolishing the Delegate Assembly as somehow "undemocratic." Jeez! I was just about to get a taste of juicy political power, when some SOBs were trying to take it away from me! As I listened further, I realized that something even more sinister and of broader concern was taking place. Apparently, the New York party was being run by a self-perpetuating oligarchical executive committee, who, in the name of "democracy," were trying to eliminate all intermediate social institutions, and to operate upon the party mass unimpeded, all in the name of "democracy." To me it smacked of rotten Jacobinism, and I got up and delivered an impassioned speech to that effect. After the session ended, a few people came up to me and said that some like-minded thinkers, who constituted the West Side Club, were having a gathering to discuss these matters. So began our nefarious alliance with the Progressive Labor faction within Peace and Freedom.

It later turned out that the PFP and its executive committee were being run, both in California and in New York, by the Leninist-Trotskyite Draperites, International Socialists run by Berkeley librarian Hal Draper. The Draperites were the original Schachtmanites, Trotskyites who had rebelled against Trotsky as Third Camp opponents of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The New York party was being run by the Draperites, including as their allies a motley collection of assorted socialists, pacifists, counter-cultural druggies, and Left Libertarians.

The opposition within PFP was indeed being run by the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PL), who the Draperites feared were plotting a takeover. Actually, it soon became clear that PL had no such intention, but were only keeping their hand in, and were using the West Side Club to recruit candidate-members into PL. Both PL and the Draperites were keeping the structure loose while waiting for an expected flood of Gene McCarthy followers after Humphrey’s expected Democratic nomination victory – a flood that, of course, never materialized. Hence the loose ideological requirement, and the fact that the platform was up for grabs. The alliance between PL and us libertarians was highly useful to both sides, in addition to cooperating in fending off Draperite dictatorship in the name of democracy. What PL got out of it was a cover for their recruiting, since no one could of course call us vehement antisocialists tools of Progressive Labor. Whatwe got out of it was PL’s firm support for an ideological platform – adopted by our joint caucus – that was probably the most libertarian of any party since the days of Cleveland Democracy. The PL people were pleasantly "straight" and nondruggie, although quite robotic, resembling left-wing Randians.

The great exception was the delightful Jake Rosen, the absolute head of PL’s fraction in the PFP. Rosen, bright, joyous, witty, and decidedly nonrobotic, knew the score. One of my fondest memories of life in the PFP was of Jake Rosen trying to justify our laissez-faire platform to his Maoist dunderheads. "Hey, Jake, what does this mean: absolute freedom of trade and opposition to all government restrictions?" "Er, that’s the ‘antimonopoly coalition’." "Oh, yeah." Jake, with more sincerity, joined us in opposing guaranteed annual income plans; he considered them bourgeois and "reactionary." About the only thing Jake balked at was our proposal that our caucus come out for immediate abolition of rent control. "Hey, fellas, look, I’d love to do it, but we have commitments to tenant groups." Graciously, we let him off the hook.

But after all those flirtations, Rothbard very early on (pre-1992) spotted a man who could deliver the libertarian message across the board:

Rothbard would have been very proud of the success that Ron Paul is having right now and its terrible that those who should know better are trying to paint Rothbard as someone that he was not. Rothbard always fought for freedom, and probably did more in that way for people around the globe than almost anyone else. But it did not stop there. On a personal level, and Rothbard told me this directly, he supported third world children through the monthly donation programs such as Save the Children.

Rothbard never wrote of this publicly (though the records might still be around), it was the private Rothbard and much different from the way Ron Paul-haters are trying to spin things.

The case against censorship, inquisition, religious intolerance, and the persecution of dissenters.

Direct Government Interference with Consumption

by Ludwig von Mises

In investigating the economic problems of interventionism we do not have to deal with those actions of the government whose aim it is to influence immediately the consumer's choice of consumers' goods. Every act of government interference with business must indirectly affect consumption. As the government's interference alters the market data, it must also alter the valuations and the conduct of the consumers. But if the aim of the government is merely to force the consumers directly to consume goods other than what they would have consumed in the absence of the government's decree, no special problems emerge to be scrutinized by economics. It is beyond doubt that a strong and ruthless police apparatus has the power to enforce such decrees.

In dealing with the choices of the consumers we do not ask what motives induced a man to buy a and not to buy b. We merely investigate what effects on the determination of market prices and thereby on production were brought about by the concrete conduct of the consumers. These effects do not depend on the considerations which led individuals to buy a and not to buy b; they depend only on the real acts of buying and abstention from buying. It is immaterial for the determination of the prices of gas masks whether people buy them of their own accord or because the government forces everybody to have a gas mask. What alone counts is the size of the demand.

Governments, which are eager to keep up the outward appearance of freedom even when curtailing freedom, disguise their direct interference with consumption under the cloak of interference with business. The aim of American prohibition was to prevent the individual residents of the country from drinking alcoholic beverages. But the law hypocritically did not make drinking as such illegal and did not penalize it. It merely prohibited the manufacture, the sale and the transportation of intoxicating liquors, the business transactions which precede the act of drinking. The idea was that people indulge in the vice of drinking only because unscrupulous businessmen prevail upon them. It was, however, manifest that the objective of prohibition was to encroach upon the individuals' freedom to spend their dollars and to enjoy their lives according to their own fashion. The restrictions imposed upon business were only subservient to this ultimate end.

The problems involved in direct government interference with consumption are not catallactic problems. They go far beyond the scope of catallactics and concern the fundamental issues of human life and social organization. If it is true that government derives its authority from God and is entrusted by Providence to act as the guardian of the ignorant and stupid populace, then it is certainly its task to regiment every aspect of the subject's conduct. The God-sent ruler knows better what is good for his wards than they do themselves. It is his duty to guard them against the harm they would inflict upon themselves if left alone.

Self-styled "realistic" people fail to recognize the immense importance of the principles implied. They contend that they do not want to deal with the matter from what, they say, is a philosophic and academic point of view. Their approach is, they argue, exclusively guided by practical considerations. It is a fact, they say, that some people harm themselves and their innocent families by consuming narcotic drugs. Only doctrinaires could be so dogmatic as to object to the government's regulation of the drug traffic. Its beneficent effects cannot be contested.

However, the case is not so simple as that. Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. A good case could be made out in favor of the prohibition of alcohol and nicotine. And why limit the government's benevolent providence to the protection of the individual's body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious, both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs.

These fears are not merely imaginary specters terrifying secluded doctrinaires. It is a fact that no paternal government, whether ancient or modern, ever shrank from regimenting its subjects' minds, beliefs, and opinions. If one abolishes man's freedom to determine his own consumption, one takes all freedoms away. The naïve advocates of government interference with consumption delude themselves when they neglect what they disdainfully call the philosophical aspect of the problem. They unwittingly support the case of censorship, inquisition, religious intolerance, and the persecution of dissenters.

This article is excerpted from chapter 27 of Human Action (1949)

The pleasure of giving is not just for the rich

Charity around the world

Charities Aid Foundation (a UK international charity): "This is the second edition of the 'World Giving Index', the largest study into charitable behavior across the globe involving 153 countries in total. Using data from Gallup's Worldview World Poll, the report is based on three measures of giving behavior - giving money, volunteering time and helping a stranger.

Overall the World Giving Index, demonstrates that the world has become a more charitable place over the last 12 months - with a 2% increase in the global population 'helping a stranger' and a 1% increase in people volunteering."