The trouble with the modern collectivistic liberal is that he has forgotten to study the nature of man. This is the sum and substance, in capsule, of Clarence B. Carson’s 548-page book, The Flight from Reality (Foundation for Economic Education, $5.00 cloth; $2.50 paperback).
Since the origins of our deep-seated malaise can be put in a sentence, one might suppose that Dr. Carson, who teaches American history at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, could have covered his subject in fewer pages. Alas, the “flight from reality” has affected so many millions of people and taken such incredibly protean forms that Dr. Carson has barely scratched the surface. He has had to deal with religion, philosophy, law, literature, journalism, history, economics, psychology—you name it and it’s here. It is obvious that each line of investigation could have produced a whole book in itself, so, actually, Dr. Carson has been most succinct.
Sticking to Dr. Carson’s fundamental message, variants of it are spotted in epigrammatic form throughout his long text. “Men,” he says at one point, “have been taught to take their eyes away from the nature of things and to focus upon the purported object or end for which an act has been performed. They have been taught that it is the motive that counts, not the consequences of the act….” At another point he condemns our thinkers and artists for ignoring “the principles of human action, the essentials of artistic or economic production, human nature, and the conditions of liberty.” In another passage he chastises our “reformers” for imagining they are “gods or demigods who could create a reality out of their dreams of it. It turns out that they were only men. It is small wonder that those who feel deepest should turn upon man, then, and describe him as so contemptible.”
Philosophical Relativism
The first “reality” to be deserted in point of time was “the Western tradition of philosophy” which ever since Plato and Aristotle had accepted the “central insight” that “there is an enduring, even an eternal, reality.” Commenting on our abandonment of our Western heritage, Dr. Carson observes that if we do not believe that enduring principles can be discovered, there is little need for education. Any man’s guess is as good as the next man’s. The lesson of history is that history has no lessons. Good and bad become hopelessly relative; a society can make anything good by simple majority vote.
Dr. Carson traces the shambles that “relativity” has made of all of our so-called disciplines with a keen eye for the ridiculous. If there is no enduring truth, how can there be any science? Why should we have a Constitution? Why not legislate utopia tomorrow? Why bother with the subject of economics, which “has to do with the frugal management of time, energy, resources, and materials so as to bring about the greatest increase in the supply of the goods and services most desired”? “Melioristic economics” assumes plenty, not scarcity—and where there is “plenty” to be grabbed, the politician who seizes it for redistribution must, for the short run at least, seem very much like a “god or demigod.” The trouble is that the “short run” considerations presuppose that a nation can live by consuming its capital, and this brings us back to “reality” with a thud.
War on the Poor
The reformer’s “flight from reality” in economics is part and parcel of the “war on the poor” that has been covered by Dr. Carson in another notable book as well as in chapters of the present work. People are hungry, so the reformer begins by legislating crop restrictions. There is unemployment, so we have minimum wage laws that keep you from hiring household help at a rate that you can afford to pay. Goods on the merchants’ shelves come at high prices, so why not have price supports and make the goods unavailable to those who cannot afford them? If you lack purchasing power, let the government inflate the currency. This will increase the supply of money, not the supply of goods, so you’ll not get anything more for having had the worth of your dollar cut by 30 per cent in ten years. It’s all as crazy as Dr. Carson describes it. But the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society were all dedicated to the idea that government intervention in behalf of augmenting craziness would raise everybody’s standard of living. If we hadn’t been blessed with technologists who could find ways of cutting the cost of making and distributing goods in spite of crop restrictions, minimum wage laws, and inflation, we would have been dead of “meliorism” long ago.
One of Dr. Carson’s best chapters is the one called “The Flight from the Constitution.” The Constitution protects “speech, the press, and religion” absolutely. But “life, liberty, and property” can be taken away by “due process of law.” There are two methods of taking property that are sanctioned by the Constitution: by taxation and by exercising the right of eminent domain. The taxing power is limited by the requirement that taxes be levied for “the common defense and general welfare, and that some of them be uniform throughout the United States.” As for “eminent domain,” it can only be exercised when “just compensation is paid” for something taken for “public use.”
Departures from the Constitution
All of this is, or should be, very clear. But Dr. Carson notices that the power to regulate commerce is used to take property from people. The minimum wage law is confiscatory, a violation of the due process clause of the Constitution. The Sixteenth Amendment gives Congress the power to “lay and collect taxes on incomes from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
But this does not “authorize” a graduated income tax, which would seemingly be outlawed by the Constitutional guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” If spinster Vivien Kellems has a good Constitutional point when she argues that she is being denied “equal protection” when the Treasury taxes her at a higher rate than it taxes married women, why haven’t we all a valid case against the government when it distinguishes between high bracket dollars and low bracket dollars? The millionaire doesn’t get the same protection for his dollar of income that is accorded to less fortunate mortals. Nobody cares very much about the millionaires, but it happens to be their Constitution, too. And how about the nineteen-year old who is drafted by the military and sent to fight in an undeclared war? His body is seized, and he is compelled to labor at a task which he has not freely chosen.
This is “slavery” by any definition, and it happens despite the Thirteenth Amendment, which specifically prohibits “involuntary servitude, except for the commission of a crime.”
Conflict Instigated
By assuming the right to seize property and redistribute it despite the Constitutional guarantees about “due process” and “equal protection of the laws,” the government has turned the U.S. into a “class society.” Men have been set against men, and groups against groups. As Dr. Carson says, a man may be a husband, a father, a son, a deacon in his church, a Mason, a golfer, a property owner, a debtor, a creditor, a consumer, a seller, a hunter, and an army veteran, but if he thinks of himself as “labor” he will not be acting as a “whole man.” By “politicalizing” the struggle for income, society is not only cut apart, it is rendered impotent.
The Flight from Reality is such a wide-ranging book that reviewing it is like reviewing a whole literature. I feel that I have done it only the most cursory sort of justice. I wish I could find some way of persuading every college freshman to read it, and to throw its contents in the face of his professors in economics, law, literature, history, and philosophy for the four years of his undergraduate life.
THE HISTORICAL SETTING OF THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS by Ludwig von Mises (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1969, 47 pp., $1)
Reviewed by Tommy W. Rogers
The importance of this book is not to be measured by its size. Von Mises ranges far beyond a chronological account of the development of important men and works in the Austrian School; he goes beyond an era history—though he provides this in revealing fashion—showing the organizational support, social influence, and status of German and Austrian universities and their interaction with the social structure. He touches on the study and uses of philosophy, epistemology, and history as they relate to liberty and its corollary requirements of openness to free enterprise and the free flow of ideas. We have here an enlightening venture into the sociology of knowledge, or the social context in which ideas develop and do or do not take root.
What was to become known as the Austrian School can be traced to the publication of Karl Menger’s Grundsatze der Volkswirt schaftslehre in 1871. His two earliest followers were Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser. They, and some younger men who had been taught by Wieser, contributed to the economic theory of marginal utility. The pejorative term “Austrian School” was applied only when their antagonism to the German historical school came into the open in the 1880′s. Even in Austrian universities (for reasons which Mises explains) those whom the world styled the “Austrian economists” were somewhat reluctantly tolerated outcasts.
The hostility that the teachings of classical economic theory received on the continent was primarily caused by political predispositions. Political economy as developed by several generations of English thinkers (of whom Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas R. Malthus, and J. S. Mill are representative) was the most exquisite outcome of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, containing the gist of the liberal doctrine that aimed at the establishment of representative government recognizing the equality of all individuals under law.
Most of the nineteenth century’s progressive politicians who advocated representative government were guided by the optimistic illusion of democratic infallibility founded on a double faith in the goodness of man and his rational mind. The arguments brought forward by the small group of liberals known as the Austrian economists did not imply any reference to an alleged infallibility of majorities. The rationale of representative government, Mises points out, is not that majorities are Godlike and infallible. “It is the intent to bring about by peaceful methods the ultimately unavoidable adjustment of the political system and the men operating its steering mechanism to the ideology of the majority.” These true liberals recognized that the only economic system which assures a steadily progressive improvement in man’s welfare can work only in an atmosphere of “undisturbed peace.” They advocated government by the people’s elected representatives because they took it for granted that only this system will lastingly preserve peace in domestic and foreign affairs.
Today, however, the reaction of “statism and socialism is sapping the foundations of Western civilization and well-being.” “But,” Mises adds, “truth persists and works, even if nobody is left to utter it.”
