Dear Dr. Leeson,

To be frank, I am shocked by your accusations about the views of Ludwig von
Mises.

To begin with, Mises was a strong advocate of democratic political
processes. In the 1920s and 1930s, as totalitarian and authoritarian
regimes were rising to power through many parts of Europe, Mises defended
liberal democracy -- going so far to say that if (classical) liberalism was
to fail in preventing these trends the proponents of liberal democracy had
no one to blame but themselves for not constructing stronger arguments to
persuade their fellow citizens. He forcefully argued against the idea that
demagogic methods could ever secure a free society in the long run. Only
better and sounder ideas could sustain a free society in that long run.

Second, to accuse Mises of racism is equally absurd. As a Jew, he was
himself a targeted victim of Nazi racism. In March of 1938, when Austria
was annexed by Nazi Germany, the Gestapo soon came looking for him in
Vienna. Fortunately, he was at that time in Geneva, Switzerland, holding a
teaching position at the Graduate Institute for International Studies. But
the Nazis broke into what had been his room in his former Vienna apartment
(which he had continued to sublet from the new tenants of that apartment)
and looted all of his personal and professional possessions.

If he had been in Vienna at that time he, no doubt, would have been
arrested, imprisoned and probably killed at some point.

Mises wrote in several of his writings on the biological and historical
wrong-headedness of the racial and racist theories of his time, and always
argued that the hallmark of a liberal democracy was an impartial rule of
law with equal civil rights and economic liberty for all in society.

Mises was also a strong proponent of free movement of people -- that is,
"open immigration." In December 1935, Mises penned an article on "The
Freedom to Move as an International Problem," criticizing countries like
Australia that limited non-whites from migrating and settling there.

Indeed, after Mises made that argument in his 1944 book, "Omnipotent
Government," the former Princeton University economist, Frank A. Fetter,
wrote to him suggesting that such ideas (due to racial biases in American)
was a position that was too out of step in the United States at that time.
Mises, to my knowledge, never changed his general position on the principle
of the freedom to move.

For some reason, that I cannot fathom, you have a seemingly unrestrained
desire to prove that somehow the ideas of members of the Austrian School
are tied to authoritarianism, racism, and almost anything else that you
disapprove of.

To my eyes and ears your mode of argumentation often seems to be *ad
hominem* attacks that have very little to do with the logic, reasoning and
substance of the economic theory and policy positions expressed over the
years by people such as Mises and Hayek (or other members of the Austrian
School).

Attempting to question their motives (and on that basis presumably
challenging the validity of their arguments) seems to be the essence of
your position.

Most Cordially,

Richard Ebeling

P.S.: If you want to find a well-known economist who did believe in
limiting the voting franchise, I suggest you look into John Stuart Mill's
"Considerations on Representative Government," in which he says that anyone
who receives welfare transfers should be denied the right to vote for as
long as they are on the dole (and for a period of time afterwards) due to a
conflict of interest in wanting to vote to pick other people's pockets in
society for their own benefit.




On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 5:54 AM, Robert Leeson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 1. Buchanan's plan to restrict the franchise was derived from 'von' Mises
> - whose attitude towards those with low ascribed status low was: you are
> 'inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take
> for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you'.
>
>
>
> 2. The Misean branch of the Austrian School of Economics is, at least in
> part, defined by secessionist aspirations and by a determination to
> demonstrate the genetic inferiority of non-whites. This reflects the
> eugenicist background that was - for most people - discredited by the
> Holocaust. Hitler arrived in Vienna unaffected by anti-Semitism - which he
> acquired from the culture co-created by prominent anti-Semites and proto
> Nazis like the von Hayeks. It would be what Hayek called 'symbolic truth'
>  to refer to the 'Hayekian Holocaust'. Hayek's brother, Heinrich, spent the
> Third Reich injecting chemicals into freshly-gassed Jews and other
> concentration camp victims.  Murray Rothbard, Hayek's co-leader of the
> fourth generation Austrian School, defended the KKK assassin of Medgar
> Evers (he also celebrated the first bombing of the World Trade Centre).
>
>
>
> Leeson, R. 2015. Ed. *Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics
> Hayek a Collaborative Biography Part III Fraud, Fascism and Free Market
> Religion.* (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
>
>
>
> 3.  Hayek had a visceral dislike of non-whites (especially the 'negro')
> and Jews. But 'I just had to restrain myself to get any hearing’.
>
>
>
> He was referring to * The Road to Serfdom* in which he had protested:
>
> When a professional student of social affairs writes a political book, his
> first duty is plainly to say so. This is a political book … But, whatever
> the name, the essential point remains that all I shall have to say is
> derived from certain ultimate values. I hope I have adequately discharged
> in the book itself a second and no less important duty: to make it clear
> beyond doubt what these ultimate values are on which the whole argument
> depends.
>
> There is, however, one thing I would like to add to this. Though this is a
> political book, I am as certain as anybody can be that the beliefs set out
> in it are not determined by my personal interests. (2007 [1944], v)
>
> In for-posthumous-general-consumption oral history interviews, Hayek
> explained what these ‘ultimate values’ were: fraud. *The Road to Serfdom*,
> he explained, had been written for personal interests: to allow the ‘old
> aristocracy’ to resume their ascribed status and to drive the ‘new
> aristocracy’ - labour trade unionists and elected politicians – back down
> the road back to serfdom.
>
> Leeson, R. 2015. Interpreting Hayek: Austrian Civilisation and the
> Neo-Feudal 'Spontaneous' Order.
>
> Chapter 3 of Leeson, R. 2015. Ed. *Archival Insights into the Evolution of
> Economics Hayek a Collaborative Biography Part II Austria America and the
> Rise of Hitler, 1899-1933*. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Societies for the History of Economics <[log in to unmask]> on behalf
> of Richard Ebeling <[log in to unmask]>
> *Sent:* Thursday, December 17, 2015 11:23 AM
>
> *To:* [log in to unmask]
> *Subject:* Re: [SHOE] 'Liberty' in South Carolina
>
> Professor Gaffney,
>
> You are joking, of course?
>
> Public Choice theory as a "front" for southern secession and the KKK?
>
> You'll have to partly throw in John-Baptiste Say, Nassau Senior and
> Vilfredo Pareto, who all formulated elements of Public Choice theory (e.g.,
> the idea of "concentration of benefits and diffusion of burdens" to
> understand the political biases toward special interest uses of government
> intervention at the expense of competitors and consumers).
> Don't forget all of Adam Smith's heirs who have emphasized analyzing
> market and political decision-making on the basis that people act on their
> defined self-interest.
> Richard Ebeling
>
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Dec 16, 2015, at 7:53 PM, Mason Gaffney <[log in to unmask]
> <[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
>
> Aha!  That fits with my strong impression that the Tullock/Buchanan axis
> was a revival of Secessionism and the KKK, sanitized as “Public Choice
> Theory” and dissociated from lynching and all that.
>
> Most of you probably know that Jim Buchanan’s grandfather John had been
> Governor of Tennessee in the 1890s.  John opposed voting rights for
> blacks, and supported the use of convict labor.
>
>
>
> Mason Gaffney
>
>
>
> *From:* Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]
> <[log in to unmask]>] *On Behalf Of *Irwin (Bud) Collier
> *Sent:* Wednesday, December 16, 2015 6:06 AM
> *To:* [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
> *Subject:* Re: [SHOE] 'Liberty' in South Carolina
>
>
>
> Gordon Tullock worked at the University of South Carolina until 1962.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Robert Leeson <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>
> In 1978, Hayek stated
>
>
>
> I am rather hoping that these ideas are now spreading. Of course, I think
> the main thing is that there are economists who are working outside their
> fields, like Jim Buchanan and [the one] in South Carolina, and some of the
> people working at UCLA. What I said before--that you cannot be a good
> economist except by being more than an economist-- I think is being
> recognized by more and more of the economists. This narrow specialization,
> particularly of the mathematical economists, is, I believe, going out.
>
>
>
> Hayek plagiarized material from John C. Calhoun: but what in South
> Carolina is Hayek referring to?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Prof. Irwin Collier, Ph.D.
> John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies
> Freie Universität Berlin
>
>