However, this gives an insight into the mentality of Ludwig von Mises, and the differences between Mises’s brand of Austrian Classical liberalism and Chicago school free market economics. We might also note Friedman’s very dim view of the Austrian business cycle theory:
“... I think the Austrian business-cycle theory has done the world a great deal of harm. If you go back to the 1930s, which is a key point, here you had the Austrians sitting in London, Hayek and Lionel Robbins, and saying you just have to let the bottom drop out of the world. You’ve just got to let it cure itself. You can’t do anything about it. You will only make it worse. You have Rothbard saying it was a great mistake not to let the whole banking system collapse. I think by encouraging that kind of do-nothing policy both in Britain and the United States, they did harm.”I might also add that to the Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist, Mises’s own Classical Liberal support for a limited state and utilitarian arguments for government intervention in some cases could also be condemned as “socialism”. And if Mises was a “socialist” to the anarcho-capitalist, Hayek was a downright Commie.
“Milton Friedman on ABCT,” June 24, 2011.
I don't speak German, but from a few movies I have seen (The Third Man, I think?), I have heard people refer to a German character as "My Seas". I assumed that it how Mises is pronounced.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Friedman pronounces his name as "Me-Sus". Which one is correct?
Anyway, Friedman mentions the anecdote with laughter. I assume that "Fon My Seas" or "Won Mee Sus" was joking as well with his comment?
"I assume that "Fon My Seas" or "Won Mee Sus" was joking as well with his comment? "
ReplyDeleteIf he was, at least he had a sense of humour. I get the impression he wasn't joking, however.
In German, if you can read IPA (International phonetic association) symbols, it would be:
[ˈluːtvɪç fɔn ˈmiːzəs]
or that is roughly:
'loot-vish fon 'mee-zus
As in many foriegn words of course, English changes that pronunciation to a naturalisd English one (or Anglicised one). An acceptable Anglicised pronunciation would be:
['lud-vig von 'mi:-zəs or 'mi:-səs]
'lood-vig von 'mee-zus
For those interested in esoteric issue of the pronunciation of Mises's name, see this thread:
ReplyDeletehttps://mises.org/Community/forums/t/9529.aspx
P.S.
"Friedman pronounces his name as 'Me-Sus'."
Yes, that's an acceptable Anglicised pronunciation. It's ['mi:-səs] in IPA.
I remember to have seen this documentary, but I don't remember the name. The first person who appear, was he Machlup? Gottfried Haberler?
ReplyDeleteThanks, Pablo.
This is from the PBS documentary "Commanding Heights".
ReplyDelete"The first person who appear, was he Machlup? Gottfried Haberler?"
I doubt it. They were both dead long before this documentary was made, and then aired in 2002.
Mises is said to have stormed out in a huff after saying this. He was most certainly not joking.
ReplyDelete"And if Mises was a “socialist” to the anarcho-capitalist, Hayek was a downright Commie."
I have a Rothbardian friend I argue with sometimes. At one point I brought up Hayek's support for something he was denouncing. He said, "yeah, Hayek was kind of a commie."
-Will
Incidentally, LK, have you watched the entire Commanding Heights documentary? Do you have a review? I think it's just terrible, on several levels.
ReplyDelete-Will
Interestingly, the documentary Commanding Heights also showed footage of Milton Friedman being booed in Chile I believe. I think a young student or something yells out "Go home!, Go home!." But some reason the video footage is edited out of the online version.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it's edited out of the DVD or not.
It's a good documentary especially about the part where they talk about the airline industry being stabilized by the govt., then privatized again.
--successfulbuild.
Jan said: In an interview with Milton Friedman -("Best of Both Worlds Reason
ReplyDeleteMilton Friedman reminisces about his career as an economist and his lifetime "avocation" as a spokesman for freedomhttp://reason.com/archives/1995/06/01/best-of-both-worlds.)
Milton Friedman is even more outspoken about his relations to von Mises,Rothbard and Ayn Rand i qoute :
Reason:Why do you think you had more initial success as a public proselytizer--you had a regular column in Newsweek--than other prominent libertarians?
Friedman: I really don't know how to answer that. I was basically trained in economic science. I was interested in the history of thought and where it came from. I thought I was going back to some fundamentals rather than creating anything new. Ayn Rand had no use for the past. She was going to invent the world anew. She was an utterly intolerant and dogmatic person who did a great deal of good. But I could never feel comfortable with her. I don't mean with her personally--I never met her personally. I'm only talking about her writings.
Rothbard was a very different character. I had some contact with Murray early on, but very little contact with him overall. That's primarily because I deliberately kept from getting involved in the Libertarian Party affairs; partly because I always thought Murray, like Rand, was a cult builder, and a dogmatist. Partly because whenever he's had the chance he's been nasty to me and my work. I don't mind that but I didn't have to mix with him. And so there is no ideological reason why I kept separate from him, really a personal reason.
Reason: In seeing yourself as harkening back to 19th-century liberalism, you never became a system-builder like Rand or Rothbard....
Friedman: Exactly. I'd rather use the term liberal than libertarian.
Friedman: I would like to be a zero-government libertarian.
Reason: Why aren't you?
Friedman: Because I don't think it's a feasible social structure. I look over history, and outside of perhaps Iceland, where else can you find any historical examples of that kind of a system developing?
I might have more public influence than ideologues like Rand or Murray Rothbard, the libertarians in that strict sense. And I believe that the reason is because they have been so intolerant.
Reason: You wrote an essay in Liberty about the intolerance of Rand and Ludwig von Mises. You say you never met Rand....
Friedman: I was never to my knowledge in the same place as she was; I was in Chicago, she was in New York. I'm sure if I had been in New York, I would have met her. It was not because of any objection on my part. I think she was a fascinating woman and had a great influence. As I always have said, she had an extremely good influence on all those who did not become Randians. But if they became Randians, they were hopeless.
Reason: But you knew Mises personally. Did you see the intolerance that you find in his method also in his personal behavior?
Friedman: No question. The story I remember best happened at the initial Mont Pelerin meeting when he got up and said, "You're all a bunch of socialists." We were discussing the distribution of income, and whether you should have progressive income taxes. Some of the people there were expressing the view that there could be a justification for it.
Another occasion which is equally telling: Fritz Machlup was a student of Mises's, one of his most faithful disciples. At one of the Mont Pelerin meetings, Fritz gave a talk in which I think he questioned the idea of a gold standard; he came out in favor of floating exchange rates. Mises was so mad he wouldn't speak to him for three years. Some people had to come around and bring them together again. It's hard to understand; you can get some understanding of it by taking into account how people like Mises were persecuted in their lives.
"Incidentally, LK, have you watched the entire Commanding Heights documentary? Do you have a review? I think it's just terrible, on several levels."
ReplyDeleteYes, I have watched the whole thing. I've never been very impressed with it, at all. It's biased and filled with errors, in my view.
"Rothbard was a very different character. I had some contact with Murray early on, but very little contact with him overall. That's primarily because I deliberately kept from getting involved in the Libertarian Party affairs; partly because I always thought Murray, like Rand, was a cult builder, and a dogmatist. Partly because whenever he's had the chance he's been nasty to me and my work. I don't mind that but I didn't have to mix with him. And so there is no ideological reason why I kept separate from him, really a personal reason."
ReplyDeleteI'm desperately trying to dig up the source where I heard this story, but I remember reading that one time in the early 60s Milton Friedman was going to give a lecture at an economic conference. He noticed that Rothbard walked in, and since Friedman read Rothbard's America's Great Depression book and had a copy on him, he never lectured and instead spent the session arguing with Rothbard about the Great Depression.
Jan said: Talking about Old Austrian Schoolars (Socialist or not?) Paul Samuelson write a very interesting critical review Friedrich von Hayek´s life work with some rather comical points,in his "A few remembrances of Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992)," *Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 69, pp. 1–4:
ReplyDeletehttp://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2009/01/paul-samuelson-2009-a-few-remembrances-of-friedrich-von-hayek-18991992.html
Paul Samuelson:
"Rise and Fall of 1931 Prices and Production
There were good historical reasons for fading memories of Hayek within the mainstream last half of the twentieth century economist fraternity. In 1931, Hayek’s Prices and Production had enjoyed an ultra-short Byronic success. In retrospect hindsight tells us that its mumbo-jumbo about the period of production grossly misdiagnosed the macroeconomics of the 1927–1931 (and the 1931–2007) historical scene.
When a centrist like me says this about an extremist like Hayek, readers have a right to reserve judgment. More weighty was the later opinion to the same effect of the conservative Lionel Robbins. It was Robbins who had brought Hayek out of Austria to the LSE. It was Robbins who wrote a 1934 Hayekian book entitled The Great Depression. Not so very long after 1934, Robbins repudiated his own early take, saying in effect, I must have been a bit loony at the time....
For my money more to the point was Richard Kahn’s simple oral 1932 statement:
If Hayek believes that the spending of newly printed currency on employment and consumption will worsen our current terrible depression, then Hayek is a nut.
Hayek himself, naively, diagnosed the fall of his 1931 opus as due to the fact that his period-of-production mutterings there did not do full justice to the not-yet-completed Austrian theory of capital (Menger, Böhm et al.). Therefore, heroically but hopelessly, he wasted years on a task that he was grossly under-equipped to handle. Hayek’s (1941) The Pure Theory of Capital was not stillborn. But it was a pebble thrown into the pool of economic science that seemingly left nary a ripple.....
Hayek’s grave defeats in the early 1930s predisposed him in the World War II years to write what he entitled, The Road to Serfdom (1944). I will postpone my take on that bestseller.
So you might say Hayek as an economist fell into what physicists call a black hole. Wisely, libertarian Hayek turned away to weighty constitutional and philosophical interests....
Friedrich Hayek’s celebrity as author of the bestseller The Road to Serfdom. It was written in London, so to speak on a bus driver’s holiday....
Two-thirds of a century after the book got written, hindsight confirms how inaccurate its innuendo about the future turned out to be. Consider only Sweden’s fig-leaf middle way. As I write in 2007, Sweden and other Scandivanian places have somewhat lowered the fraction of GDP they use to devote through government. But still they are the most “socialistic” by Hayek’s crude definition. Where are their horror camps? Have the vilest elements risen there to absolute power? When reports are compiled on “measurable unhappiness,” do places like Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway best epitomize serfdoms? No. Of course not. American conservatives like my old friend the late David McCord Wright, confronted by such counter evidence would say to me up to his last years: “Paul, just you wait.” I never tired of waiting....He has acknowledged the influence of Ludwig von Mises to convert him to his lifelong libertarian quasi-laissez faire market capitalism. Hayek, along with Mises and Milton Friedman and other libertarians, attended periodic meetings of the Mt. Pelerin Society. (Once it had been suggested to be named the Acton Having spent a lifetime near libertarians, I can confirm that they are an individualistic idiosyncratic bunch. For example, my conservative mentor Gottfried Haberler was defined by Mises to be a “communist.” The number of Mt. Pelerin resignations never quite reached the number of its new members.)"