http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304259304576375491103635726.html
Ms. Bachmann is best known for her conservative activism on issues like abortion, but what I want to talk about today is economics. When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. "I'm also an Art Laffer fiend—we're very close," she adds. "And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises," getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like "Human Action" and "Bureaucracy." "When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises."
Okay, great, so let's see how MIses' work has shaped her economics: (excerpts)
/facepalm
I never really liked Bachmann and while it's nice to see Mises' name dropped sometimes it would be better if it wasn't.
She'e just name dropping.
Eating Propaganda
What do you mean i don't care how your day was?!
Art Laffer and Mises? Does not compute!
Seriously, how could you be a 'fiend' for a policy wonk like Art Laffer? Nothing could be more disingenuous.
It's like being someone whose favorite memory from college is using groovy scantrons.
That's why I don't get all the appreciation for that "Dr." Robert Murphy fellow. Not only has he read Laffer's work, he's worked for him! Hopefully the Mises Institute will give Murphy the boot one of these days.
Plus, she's a politician. Why shouldn't she be interested in policy, or at least want to appear as if she were, especially when that policy wonk is affiliated with Ronald Reagan? Consider it as shameless and likely as disingenous as her Mises plug.
As far as I know, Murphy is not a 'fiend' for Laffer.
It's a different issue, and a legitimate one, to know who he is. And it is not a problem to work with him.
If there were a genuine Lafferite at the Mises Institute, I would be suspicious. And would recommend a booting. Given his principle aim: to get a maximum amount of dollars (and thus power) to the state.
When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises.
That's an incredibly stupid and childish sentence, can you imagine Ron Paul saying anything like that? She is a republican clown.
It would certainly explain a few things if these "Mises-loving" Republicans are reading him at the beach, dehydrated, sunstroked and yelling at the children between every paragraph.
Would a person who loves reading Mises vote for the infamous 2008 Stimulus Package?
reading Mises is one thing, but putting what Mises had to say into action is another thing...
My Blog: http://www.anarchico.net/
Production is 'anarchistic' - Ludwig von Mises
Soon she'll come out with a new book:
When Airheads Sunbathe: My Afternoon with Mises
Superior: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psosLpDALuA
no thanks
oh god..
"If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion."
@Jacob
Haha, are you responding to my post? I wasn't peddling. It was a, perhaps poor, attempt at humor comparing the effort of that obviously tongue-in-cheek youtube video with Michelle Bachmann's statements. Shrug. Anyway, I'm not really adding anything here so it's back to lurkerdom for me. :P
Scum of the earth
This is amazing. I would vote for her if I believed in voting. Not over Ron Paul of course but a Paul-Bachmann ticket would be win.
Freedom4Me73986: This is amazing. I would vote for her if I believed in voting. Not over Ron Paul of course but a Paul-Bachmann ticket would be win.
Sarcastic?
Stephen Moore:Ms. Bachmann is best known for her conservative activism on issues like abortion, but what I want to talk about today is economics. When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. "I'm also an Art Laffer fiend—we're very close," she adds. "And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises," getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like "Human Action" and "Bureaucracy." "When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises."
"I'm not a fan of Murray Rothbard." -- David D. Friedman
http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/25048.aspx
ha I thought he had just changed the title of the thread. I knew I had seen "bachmann loves mises" as a title.
:EDIT:
Looks like it's been merged now.
Michael J Green:That's why I don't get all the appreciation for that "Dr." Robert Murphy fellow. Not only has he read Laffer's work, he's worked for him! Hopefully the Mises Institute will give Murphy the boot one of these days.
1) "Dr"? I don't get it. Are you suggesting he doesn't deserve a PhD? Or that one from NYU is no good?
2) I didn't realize reading someone's work was a crime against Austrian economics.
3) I didn't realize being employed as a research and portfolio analyst for a mainstream economic and investment consultancy firm was crime either.
your sig is tha shit Lagrange mulitiplier.
I was laughing for longer than i thought i was.
And.. the follow-up articles begin:
Michele Bachmann's dangerous beach reading
http://www.salon.com/news/michele_bachmann/?story=/tech/htww/2011/06/13/mises_on_the_beach_with_bachmann
Salon has issued three hit pieces on Ludwig von Mises, unfortunately sans any substance. Anybody who calls Austrians "right-wing" is a moron. While many Tea Partiers are attracted to people like Hayek and Mises, they do not fully carry out their ideas in practice and obviously social and foreign policy-wise, the Austrian school of economics has no opinion on the matter. Unless they want to say that libertarians are "right-wing", which obviously makes the left-right dichotomy a rather false one. But these people can't think beyond that; they've been conditioned by pop media and pop thought to come to that conclusion.
I've seen libertarians accused of having to answer for Scott Walker and Chris Christie who are "implementing libertarian ideas on a practical level."
yea man. bachmann i s playing the role of making good ideas look like the ideas of fools. That is precisely why glenn beck was promoting hayek having probably never read a word of it himself (while promoting goldline to rip people off). They have milton friedman to try and refute rothbard not to mention they don't even consider excessive credit a plausible explanation of bubbles.
Saul Alinsky should be who we are reading....0_o to win the political game. We can still take the high road and use thier tactics.
and my GOD that salon article. It was right about one thing...."hot to get libertarians hot and bothered; by mentioning LvM" what she left out yet went far into detail of MIScharacterization of the most tainted political bias imaginable.
People's hostility to new ideas is far worse than any color or cultural difference people can imagine. Can you imagine comparing a far superior intellectual to a no-helmet-harley-riding-anarchist?
I'd like to remind people of H.L. Mencken,
"My guess is that well over eighty per cent of the human race goes through life without ever having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before, and by thousands. A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. The pressure of ideas would simply drive it frantic. The normal human society is very little troubled by them. Whenever a new one appears the average man displays signs of dismay and resentment. The only way he can take in such a new idea is by translating it crudely into terms of more familiar ideas. That translation is one of the chief functions of politicians, not to mention journalists. They devote themselves largely to debasing the ideas launched by their betters. This debasement is intellectually reprehensible, but probably necessary to carry on the business of the world."
Salon filled their role.
I liked one part of the Salon link above:
"Austrians are hardcore. Imagine Paul Krugman peddling his bicycle, Milton Friedman tootling around town on a Vespa, and then here come the Austrians roaring down Main Street on the gnarliest pack of ape-hanger-styling Harley-Davidson choppers this side of "Sons of Anarchy."
We are the soldiers for righteousnessAnd we are not sent here by the politicians you drink with - L. Dube, rip
Who honestly cares? She can read what ever she wants.
And helmet laws are pretty damn stupid. It makes me wonder if these people actually hate freedom, even in theoretical form. It was an aside and poking fun at libertarians, but the snideness makes me think that they are implying that helmet laws aren't tyranny. I don't like using language like "conditioned" and I don't like calling other worldviews "warped" because it reeks of dogmatism, but I can't think of another word to describe these knee-jerk reflexive statists. I really can't.
Acerbic sarcasm is also something that is rampant on the Internet and in mass media as well. It really is terrible at expressing and defending ideas. It doesn't get anybody anywhere and, worse, it's not even funny.
I hope that writer drowns in the ignorance he's bathing in.
"Fiend" could be a typo of "friend".
She made me want to throw up every time she talked in the debate tonight.
she obviously has the same handlers as Palin. She has the same strategy for appeal to the common man, appeal to sympathy, and glittering generalizations. It's the worst when they stick to propaganda techniques from the 1930's. She is being set up to be an obvious fall candidate. She even took up time on a question to introduce her pathetic campaign for the office. Red flags galore for the old school demagouge. Obama is in the 21st century brainwashing technique business and look how well it works for him;
"I'm in. Are you?"
Bachmann just spouted on and on about her ridiculous amount of children and how compassionate that makes her. You know, i realize it's a good thing to give kids homes and such, but it does strike me as strange to parent 28 children. I think it's weird for Jolie and Pitt to have 4 multi cultural kids. I think they are trying to train public opinion to not havve kids, but adopt. After all, they all say the third world is too populated.
Ron started off shaky, i think he was a little too trained on talking points, but after the first question he owned the rest of them. They catch him off guard with those stupid 'people pleaser' questions and they stayed away from the wars cause paul will get all of the attention.
Salon has issued three hit pieces on Ludwig von Mises
And here's one more mention! Andrew Leonard returns to Mises after reading a whole 70 pages of Human Action (granted, they are tough pages), at which point he feels qualified to psychoanalyze a man who lived during a very unique time in a very unique intellectual climate. And by extension, he analyzes us Miseans.
The hypocrisy is awesome. Remember: we are the ones with a resolute faith in a single institution. Not like clear-thinking people such as Andrew Leonard or most Democrats.
The worst thing about something like this is that if lazy partisans with a political axe to grind get wind of this, they will use Bachmann and her fascistic nonsense to destroy Mises by association. They will simply make bald assertions like they always do, never having actually read a word of Mises' writings, nor taking the time to think through and consider them.
Bachmann herself makes be sick. It's so obvious and blatant that she's dropping Mises' name out there for the sole purpose of scoring brownie points with libertarians, and the fact that she mentions him in the same breath as that prehensile, oleaginous, toad-sucking wonk (who STILL owes Peter Schiff a penny!) Art Laffer proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Any one can do a Google Search on "Free Market Economists," find the name "Ludwig von Mises," and learn by clicking on the first link on the list that two of his books are "Bureaucracy" and "Human Action." That doesn't impress me. Laffer, like that other so-called "libertarian" Milton Friedman is nought more than an efficiency expert for the state. If you tailor your plans to allow the prime institution of coercion and compulsion, theft and crime, to proceed along with its predations in a more efficient and less costly fashion, then you are of an even more deadly variety of statist that those bleeding-heart, pie-in-the-sky fools with their Stone Age economics, the liberals.
I wonder how many members of species Boobus Americanus will believe her! I know I'm preaching to the choir here, so let the Political Theater continue! Vivat Comoedia!
@kok92- (ha) you are right. If they can defame one of our our most prized idealouges and philosophers (not to mention economists) by relating him and everything he said to BACHMANN and right wing fundamentalism, the y ca n d o mu ch ha rm.
Excerpts from the Salon article posted above: my comments are in italics
All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another.
Indeed, all the progress that has occurred in the past few centuries, argues Mises, can be attributed to the unleashing of the power of capitalism through unconstrained economic activity. Furthermore, it is Mises' contention that economists -- the classical economists who flourished in England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries -- are the true heroes of civilization: mankind's great liberators. (Don't we all feel like the supreme liberators of mankind for studying something like economics?)
... [T]he tremendous progress of technological methods of production and the resulting increase in wealth and welfare were feasible only through the pursuit of those liberal policies which were the practical application of the teachings of economics. It was the ideas of the classical economists that removed the checks imposed by age-old laws, customs, and prejudices upon technological improvement and freed the genius of reformers and innovators from the straitjackets of the guilds, government tutelage, and social pressure of various kinds. It was they that reduced the prestige of conquerors and expropriators and demonstrated the social benefits derived from business activity. None of the great modern inventions would have been put to use if the mentality of the precapitalistic era had not been thoroughly demolished by the economists. What is commonly called the "industrial revolution" was an offspring of the ideological revolution brought about by the doctrines of the economists. The economists exploded the old tenets: that it is unfair and unjust to outdo a competitor by producing better and cheaper goods; that it is iniquitous to deviate from the traditional methods of production; that machines are an evil because they bring about unemployment; that it is one of the tasks of civil government to prevent efficient businessmen from getting rich and to protect the less efficient against the competition of the more efficient; that to restrict the freedom of entrepreneurs by government compulsion or by coercion on the part of other social powers is an appropriate means to promote a nation's well-being.
One of the most striking things I have learned about Mises is that, at least while writing "Human Action" in the late 1940s, he appears to have suffered from a sense of aggrievement at how the lessons of classical economists were being ignored during his day, whether by American New Dealers or Soviet communists. Mises is a truth-teller, but everywhere, his gospel is being ignored or trampled. (hmmm.)
The characteristic feature of this age of destructive wars and social disintegration is the revolt against economics. Thomas Carlyle branded economics a "dismal science," and Karl Marx stigmatized the economists as "the sycophants of the bourgeoisie." Quacks -- praising their patent medicines and short cuts to an earthly paradise -- take pleasure in scorning economics as "orthodox" and "reactionary." Demagogues pride themselves on what they call their victories over economics. The "practical" man boasts of his contempt for economics and his ignorance of the teachings of "armchair" economists. The economic policies of the last decades have been the outcome of a mentality that scoffs at any variety of sound economic theory and glorifies the spurious doctrines of its detractors. What is called "orthodox" economics is in most countries barred from the universities and is virtually unknown to the leading statesmen, politicians, and writers. The blame for the unsatisfactory state of economic affairs can certainly not be placed upon a science which both rulers and masses despise and ignore.
Intriguingly, Mises does not differentiate between totalitarian dictatorships and constitutional democracies. In both cases, the ruler scoffs at the economist. (He doesn't need to; the author still does not get the point)
The issue has been obfuscated by the endeavors of governments [and powerful pressure groups] to disparage economics and to defame the economists. (Check) Despots and democratic majorities are drunk with power. (Check) They must reluctantly admit that they are subject to the laws of nature. But they reject the very notion of economic law. (Check) Are they not the supreme legislators? Don't they have the power to crush every opponent? No warlord is prone to acknowledge any limits other than those imposed on him by a superior armed force. Servile scribblers are always ready to foster such complacency by expounding the appropriate doctrines. They call their garbled presumptions "historical economics." In fact, economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.
I will leave a critique of Mises to another time -- perhaps when I've read more than a mere ten percent of "Human Action." But aside from the content of the first two chapters, what struck me most about "Human Action" was Mises' absolute certainty that he was right, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he had grasped an essential truth of existence, comprehended the primary engine of progress, and that anyone who might think differently is a fool or a tyrant -- or, perhaps worst of all from my vantage-point, a "servile scribbler" fostering complacency in the face of harsh enlightenment. (Sounds like the author should man up, no? Or if it's a woman douche up? Whatever.)
Now it all makes sense to me. On the one hand, Michelle Bachmann has the word of God to guide her, as expressed through His son Jesus. On the other, there's the word of von Mises, as expressed through the price mechanism. Absolute certainty exerts a potent seduction, whether spiritual or economic. Is it really all that strange that the two might go together? (Here is the fatal concession. He is right and wrong. Economic/philosophical/religious/political beliefs blend together. The author is guilty of the same thing he is accusing Mises of.
"implying that helmet laws aren't tyranny."
That's a bit dramtic.
Amadeus:Who honestly cares? She can read what ever she wants.
Obviously it would be great if more politicians read Mises. I think the point is it's obvious she is at least overstating her case.
bbnet: I liked one part of the Salon link above: "Austrians are hardcore. Imagine Paul Krugman peddling his bicycle, Milton Friedman tootling around town on a Vespa, and then here come the Austrians roaring down Main Street on the gnarliest pack of ape-hanger-styling Harley-Davidson choppers this side of "Sons of Anarchy."
That is so hilarious! Bob Murphy had almost the very same sentiment.
Michael J Green: Salon has issued three hit pieces on Ludwig von Mises And here's one more mention! Andrew Leonard returns to Mises after reading a whole 70 pages of Human Action (granted, they are tough pages), at which point he feels qualified to psychoanalyze a man who lived during a very unique time in a very unique intellectual climate. And by extension, he analyzes us Miseans. The hypocrisy is awesome. Remember: we are the ones with a resolute faith in a single institution. Not like clear-thinking people such as Andrew Leonard or most Democrats.
Tucker's on it