Red Sky at Morning

Campus Report ^ | November 7, 2008 | Malcolm A. Kline

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Red Sky at Morning

by: Malcolm A. Kline, November 07, 2008

An argument could be made that this past presidential election, like so many others that did not involve Ronald Reagan, was not so much a choice between a liberal and a conservative as much as what authors such as Jonah Goldberg and my predecessor at Accuracy in Academia Dan Flynn might term a contest between feminine and masculine progressives. Accordingly, we have to dig into the past to see how we came to this impasse.

“Man is not a being that, on the one hand, has an economic side and, on the other hand, a political side, with no connection between the two,” Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) wrote. “In fact, what is called the decay of freedom, of constitutional government and representative institutions is the consequence of the radical change in economic and political ideas.”

“The political events are the inevitable consequence of the change in economic policies.” Herr von Mises was the founder of the free-market Austrian school of economics.

He uttered these thoughts in a series of lectures given in 1959, the year of my birth. “Under interventionist ideas, it is the duty of government to support, to subsidize, to give privileges to special groups,” von Mises stated. “The idea of the eighteenth-century statesmen was that the legislators had special ideas about the common good.”

“But what we have today, what we see today in the reality of political life, practically without any exception, in all the countries of the world where there is not simply communist dictatorship, is a situation where there are no longer real political parties in the old classical sense, but merely pressure groups.”....