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1 researchok  Wed, Jun 1, 2011 4:15:26pm

You can run but you can't hide.

That's a lesson Ron Paul has learned, re his newsletters.

By next year, Rand Paul will have learned that as well. His adversarial relationship with the Civil Rights Acts will come back to haunt him.

2 laZardo  Wed, Jun 1, 2011 5:01:46pm
Still, Rand and Ron’s philosophy on Civil Rights is no different than Barry Goldwater’s, who ran for President in 1964 with the support of the John Birch Society and racist whites in the South who wanted to continue segregation.

Guess he was really more conservative than I thought.

3 EiMitch  Wed, Jun 1, 2011 8:05:45pm

I have a slightly off-topic question, just out of curiosity:

It is my understanding that the Ludwig Von Mises Institute was founded after the death of professor Ludwig Von Mises. Was he a racist too, or did the institute tack-on the white supremacist crap?

4 (I Stand By What I Said Whatever It Was)  Wed, Jun 1, 2011 11:27:05pm

re: #3 EiMitch

Well, Mises was jewish, and thus had good reason to migrate from Germany, first to Switzerland in 1934 and subsequently to New York City in 1940. Of course, that is not an answer to the question, so…

The part of Mises' work most often cited for his views on racism is probably chapter VIII of his 1944 book Omnipotent Government: "Anti-Semitism and Racism".

I think it is fair to say that Mises analysis of racism was muddled in a lot of ways, in part because he was willing to concede that races existed in some biologically or physically meaningful way. For instance, he seems to argue in the aformenetioned text that Nazis were not true racists because they were not consistent in their proclaimed racism (this line of reasoning includes the implicit premise that a consistent racism is conceivable). I don't know whether that makes him, in the context of his time, particularly racist.

Insofar Mises analyzes racist politics as a result of "interventionism" against competitors belonging to ethnic minorities and the evils of Nazism as a totalitarian outgrowth of etatism (or: statism) which was in opposition to "true" liberalism and the free market, he does not essentially differ from Hayek in his Road to Serfdom. Mises seems to argue that racist politics are ultimately flawed because they are, according to his political and economical axioms, non-utilitarian. I think this is untrue. I also do not think that racism is only aimed at competitors. Furthermore, I think the "free market" as the Austrian school and other adherents of the neoclassical school of economics dream of, is an utopia not more realistic than the carricature they have made out of socialism.

Going back to "libertarianism" and racism, I think the closest you could come to a personal link between these two movements would be Murray Rothbard, who, in collaboration with Lew Rockwell, made a successful yet unfortunate bid at crafting a coalition between two seemingly disparate schools of thought in the American political discourse: the "Old Right" and Anarchism, united under the banner of "free-market capitalism" and sometimes dubbed "paleolibertarianism". Neoconfederates and their racism played a big role in Old Right thought, and because of a lot of deficiencies in anarchist and neoclassical thought, they fit right in there.

So, as far as I can tell, the Institute tacked on the crap. But it wasn't much of a problem.

See also:

Individualist Anarchism vs. "Libertarianism" and Anarchocommunism, by Wendy McElroy

A Note on the "Mises" Institute, by Charle Steele

5 Michael Orion Powell  Thu, Jun 2, 2011 12:44:48am

To be fair hear, I have never heard of a connection between Paul and the John Birch Society before.

6 Michael Orion Powell  Thu, Jun 2, 2011 1:01:27am

re: #3 EiMitch

I have a slightly off-topic question, just out of curiosity:

It is my understanding that the Ludwig Von Mises Institute was founded after the death of professor Ludwig Von Mises. Was he a racist too, or did the institute tack-on the white supremacist crap?

In addition to the other response you got, I would say that Mises was racist to the degree that most people of his generation and background were. Even if he were Jewish, he was from Austria and came of age in the period leading up to the first world war. Most of Europe was in full fledged imperial mode and resentment in Germany had quite a bit to do with Germans feeling like they were getting the short end of the stick in being subordinated by other powers instead of having their rightful place ruling over brown people.


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