Сегодня как никогда важно вспоминать мысли великанов прошлого века, среди которых Людвиг фон Мизес занимает особое положение.
Today the tenets of this nineteenth-century philosophy of liberalism
are almost forgotten. In continental Europe it is remembered only by a
few. In England the term “liberal” is mostly used to signify a program
that only in details differs from the totalitarianism of the socialists.* In
the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates
that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant
to the preceding generations. The American self-styled liberal aims
at government omnipotence, is a resolute foe of free enterprise, and
advocates all-round planning by the authorities, i.e., socialism. These
“liberals” are anxious to emphasize that they disapprove of the Russian
dictator’s policies not on account of their socialistic or communistic
character but merely on account of their imperialistic tendencies.
Every measure aiming at confiscating some of the assets of those who
own more than the average or at restricting the rights of the owners of
property is considered as liberal and progressive. Practically unlimited
discretionary power is vested in government agencies the decisions of
which are exempt from judicial review. The few upright citizens who
dare to criticize this trend toward administrative despotism are branded
as extremists, reactionaries, economic royalists, and Fascists. It is suggested
that a free country ought not to tolerate political activities on the
part of such “public enemies.”
Surprisingly enough, these ideas are in this country viewed as specifically
American, as the continuation of the principles and the philosophy
of the Pilgrim Fathers, the signers of the Declaration of Independence,
and the authors of the Constitution and the Federalist
papers. Only few people realize that these allegedly progressive policies
originated in Europe and that their most brilliant nineteenth-century
exponent was Bismarck, whose policies no American would qualify as
progressive and liberal. Bismarck’s Sozialpolitik was inaugurated in
1881, more than fifty years before its replica, F. D. Roosevelt’s New
Deal. Following in the wake of the German Reich, the then most successful
power, all European industrial nations more or less adopted the
system that pretended to benefit the masses at the expense of a minority
of “rugged individualists.” The generation that reached voting age
after the end of the first World War took statism for granted and had
only contempt for the “bourgeois prejudice,” liberty.
Ludwig von Mises
New York, April, 1962
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
