Friday, January 2, 2009

Time is upset with Lew Rockwell

Lew Rockwell blogs on the mouthpieces of the Establishment vs. those of the Truth:

When I last picked up a copy of Time - in a doctor's office, where paleo-print goes to die - I was struck by how sickly it is. Virtually no ads, and apparently fewer and fewer readers. Who wants to read last week's news? And to think the old CIA mouthpiece was once on top of the world (the Cold War world, anyway). Now it's trying blogs, and thanks to Adam Dada for sending me the "capitalist" one. The author hilariously sees Austrian economics as divided into two parts: the nice one, entirely in the super-wealthy Koch Brothers ambit, and the mean one, in mine!

A little background: when I started the Mises Institute (an organization unmentioned by Time) 26 years ago, the head of the Koch Family Foundation angrily pledged to destroy me if I went ahead. "We have worked too hard to rid Austrian economics of Mises," he said. Hayek, he claimed, was their man, though, of course, he was far better than that, and a good supporter of the Institute. But the real problem turned out to be Murray Rothbard. It was the greatest of the Misesians and the founder of modern libertarianism whom the Koch World Empire longed to smash, and still does. Murray, founder of Cato, was the one man in the ambit to say no when the Kochs decided to jettison Mises for reasons of DC preferment. Otherwise, they felt, it would be harder to curry favor with the Fed and the Republican party. Hayek's views on central banking, gold, conservatism, and competitive currencies are no more DC-friendly than Mises's and Rothbard's, but they are ignored, and just his name invoked.

Over more than 40 years, I have had the honor to work with such giants of economics and liberty as Mises, Hazlitt, Hayek, and especially Rothbard. Indeed, Hazlitt told me that my "greatest achievement was to give Rothbard a platform," and I think I have also helped support the Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard tradition, and some of the many important scholars working in it. That's why such Koch mouthpieces as Reason will say anything on orders. The Kochs also oppose the great Austro-libertarian statesman, Ron Paul, for his refusal to endorse the Fed when he was head of one of their organizations. None of us, however, is backing down. Among young people, in fact, we've already won. Mises held that ideas can beat back the state. Ideas can also triumph over billions of oil dollars, and the establishment's antique media.

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