Marxists have long said that the people would embrace socialism if it weren’t for “false consciousness” implanted by their propertied masters. Many books making that claim have been written and leftist intellectuals know that if they write another one, it will find an eager publisher and accolades from like-minded reviewers.
Now, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have penned a book in that tradition, The Big Myth. It’s a hefty tome and I’m glad to report that the redoubtable Phil Magness has read it and written a devastating review.
As is the norm these days, the book is loaded with cheap shots against scholars who opposed collectivism. In this one, Ludwig von Mises, a Jew who fled the Nazis, is called a fascist sympathizer.
Here’s what Magness says about that:
After dubbing him an “absolutist who sympathized with fascism,” Oreskes and Conway launch into an extended attack on the Austrian economist’s migration to the United States in 1940. In their telling, Mises was a relic of a bygone laissez faire ideology who struggled to find a respectable academic job until “dark money” funders created a succession of positions for him at New York University. It is doubtful they would pass similar judgment on the many academic refugees from Nazi Germany who hailed from the political left. Meanwhile, Mises’ academic work in the United States gained higher honors than either Oreskes or Conway has ever achieved. By the decade’s end, he had published three monographs with Yale University Press, including the decidedly anti-fascist book Omnipotent Government. Upon his retirement from teaching at age 88, Mises was named a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association.
No serious scholar could possibly find the slightest trace of sympathy in any of von Mises’ books for fascism. He was a resolute defender of liberalism in the classical (true) sense of the word. Alas, smearing intellectuals who argued against collectivism gets you automatic applause from Americans who have been taught to think that freedom is frightening.
What about the big argument in the book that it was a dastardly cabal of big money business types who pushed the idea of economic freedom down the throats of gullible Americans to get them away from their natural inclination to embrace big government? It’s sheer nonsense. According to Oreskes and Conway, Americans would have turned to “progressive” collectivism if it hadn’t been for dark money creating the “big myth” Evidently they are unfamiliar with the various socialist experiments that arose in the U.S. in the 19th century (such as New Harmony, Indiana) that not only did not attract throngs of people eager to escape from the horrors of private property, but quickly flopped as central planning proved to be woefully inefficient.
How about today? Magness has this crushing observation:
Oreskes and Conway use the pandemic to contrast U.S. “market failure” with the alleged success of ‘countries that mounted a strong, coordinated response,’ China foremost among them. As their book went to press, China’s centralized “zero-COVID” regime was collapsing into the same unfettered disease spread that Oreskes and Conway ascribe to free markets. But readers should not expect any self-interrogation from this pair.
That old line about an idea so stupid only intellectuals could believe it applies in full force to the notion that Chinese authoritarianism should be our model for dealing with viral diseases (and everything else).
Hat tip: Don Boudreaux