I don't see myself here: Mises and "The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality"

Mises is interesting to me in part because he helped kick off the Socialist Calculation debate in the 20s by trying to show how socialism wouldn’t work in his estimation. I thought Mises’s argument was tortured, but Hayek did put a nice bow on it by looking at the problem of incomplete information.

I wanted to read more Mises without having to slog through Human Action, so I pulled this text. This text is especially salient to me because I am highly critical of capitalism as it really exists. The problem is that in reading the book, I really didn’t see myself. I think this is because the Capitalism Mises describes is a very rosy idealized version that doesn’t exist – there are no embedded power structures that prevent the rise of the talented or anything that distributes rent to people who don’t earn it. For Mises, in fact, even crisis and depression are not part of the capitalistic system, but are instead “the result of interventionist attempts to regulate capitalism” (pp. 60). For Mises, the person who is against capitalism is so because of a sort of envy of those who have been successful – he internalizes the idea that the fruits of labor and capital are evenly distributed and any questioning of this is sour grapes. To me, this is laughable in that same vein of argument that communism will work only just we haven’t tried real communism yet – with that being defined differently by the speaker. Ultimately, I wasn’t convinced. Perhaps I’ll have to slog through Human Action to get at his arguments in more depth, but I’m in no rush.