I wrote:  
  
I went to a von Mises  
> lecture in 1952 or so, in San Mateo County, sponsored by Herbert Cornuelle  
> for the Erhard Fdtn. It was by invitation only. There was one entrance  
only;  
> you passed between two huge guards. Von Mises announced he would take no  
> questions. He lectured ex cathedra for too long a time, and disappeared.  
You  
> can understand how that leaves a fascistic impression, even though his  
> record shows him opposing Nazism. (The enemy of my enemy need not be my  
> friend, and all that.)  
>     
 Steve Horwitz responds:  
  
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to not respond to anything else in this   
post because I simply cannot take seriously someone who suggests that an   
Austrian Jew who fled the Nazis (the Gestapo came to his apartment   
looking specifically for him in 1938), having to leave behind his   
library only to have it confiscated by them, is an "autocrat" and leaves a   
"fascist impression."  To further imply that we need to look at his   
"record" to actually believe he opposed Nazism is simply unacceptable in   
serious academic discourse.  Of what other serious economist would   
someone have the chutzpah to say that we even need to look at "the   
record" to be sure they weren't a Nazi/fascist sympathizer?   
  
If you want to raise serious arguments about Mises's economics, please   
do. This, however, is another matter."  
  
  
I believe that Horwitz' anger is uncalled for. It is he who brings up Mises'  
religion and/or ethnicity, of which I wrote and know nothing. The  
inflammatory words are his, and seem a complete distraction from our topic.  
  
Hitler persecuted communists and Poles and gypsies and gays and the  
feeble-minded, as well as Jews. That did not automatically turn all  
communists, for example, into anti-autocratic personalities, any more than  
the persecution of English Puritans turned them into civil libertarians when  
they moved to New England.  Social psychology is not my field, but it is  
widely alleged that a history of having suffered persecution is more, rather  
than less likely to make one persecute others.  
  
As to another serious economist whom one could suspect of being a fascist  
sympathizer, I believe Vilfredo Pareto's history bears that interpretation;  
certainly many of his writings do. The collaboration of some Chicago  
economists with Pinochet raises similar questions. Hitler had his Hjalmar  
Schacht, and certain U.S. Presidents ... well, I'd better stop here.  
  
   
Mason Gaffney