Was Mises Bankrolled by the Financial Elite?

I know I am spending too much time on these crazy LaRouchian claims — see my post on the argument that Austrian economics benefits the plutocrats, and therefore has been promoted by them. You will hear it mentioned that the Rockefeller Foundation funded Ludwig von Mises, and that this proves Austrian economics is supported by the elites, even though (1) the elites went to a lot of trouble to establish the world’s central banks, which the Austrian School opposes, and (2) if the elites are that powerful, why is the Austrian School so little known after all their alleged efforts to promote it?

I asked Mises biographer Guido Hülsmann to comment on this. Here’s his reply:

The crucial evidence against this interpretation is twofold:

(a) The RF stopped funding Mises when he needed it most, and did not help him get a prestigious position in a US university, which they did for all true hacks. If he was truly in their pocket this was a very stupid thing to do.

(b) AFTER he was off RF money, Mises continued to profess and develop exactly the same views that he had already professed and developed BEFORE he got to meet any RF people. That’s not the behaviour of an intellectual prostitute. You would rather expect him to change his tune to the likings of his sponsors.

This leaves only one viable interpretation: The RF started funding Mises because he was already a major representative of Viennese intellectual life. Mises was part of the European intellectual establishment before he received financial support from US financial aristocracy. Like all new private research institutions, the RF first tried to hop into bed with the already existing scientific establishment to prop up its own reputation. Only in a second step did the RF (and similar organisations) try to steer the scientific agenda according to its own political and philosophical prejudices. When they proceeded from Step One to Step Two, there was no more place for Mises precisely because his views were unacceptable to RF.

Richard Carey

Tom,

I reckon it’s time for another zombie interview.
Grey

THIS IS ALL PART OF THE SCAM AND UNDERGROUND PSY OPS OF GLIBAL DOMINATION. MISES LIKES GOLD AND RF HAS THE GOLD. PROOF PROOF PROOF!

LOL… Dealing with these people is making my head numb. Stupidity.
CT

Idiots. These people remind me of crazed Marxists who think it’s logically defensible to discard a thinker because they benefit from the “system” and therefore have a created a theoretical framework which benefits them or the creators of desmogblog who seem to think that someone receiving corporate donations is grounds for invalidating their opponents.
It’s all nonsense and you should seriously just ignore.
Taylor Conant

An “Austrian” like Tom Woods who was educated in elite establishment institutions like Harvard WOULD defend Mises like this…

(That was a joke.)
Dan

The nice thing about guys like you spending time on these claims is it saves the rest of us time by being able to just link to this stuff. It’s nice to have these kind of posts on the Internet for future utilization.

My opinion is that if you have the time available you should hit these guys every chance you get. Same with dipstick Max. The Internet isn’t running out of space for great smack downs. Only if it takes away from more important work would I say to stop.

For any brave enough acolyte of Austrian economics who is willing, I think it would be a great blog idea to just find all these bogus arguments and destroy them. I know I would personally visit a site like that every day.
PhilB

I have been reading some LaRaouch books as of late to get a sense of this man. I believe he is of good intentions, but reading his material a personality of serious vanity and dogmatism combined with insulting rhetoric completely unfounded and with no demonstrable evidence is unscientific and ruins credibility. LaRaouch says that Milton Friedman was Hayeks lacky and that the Mont Pelerin society was “quite frankly” a “Satanic-cult worship.” His cited proof of this? Literaly: footnote 57, page 227 in “Earths Next Fifty Years,” because Friedman suggested, common sense, on a Phil Donahu show that they way to end the drug wars was to legalize drugs. Thats it. Bang. Satanists all-around. Its bizarre rhetoric like this that makes LaRouch so confused. I will say, in the spirit of Tom Woods and being a gentleman, LaRouch does have some intellectually, very stimulating, thoughts on analysis of Classical Drama and Classical Composition and its relation to what he calls “re-enactment of discovery,” but as far as economics goes….he is not attractive to say the least. Stick with literary criticism, LaRouch, leave the offensive Hayek attacks to the NWO. Peace.
Andy

Instead of “zombie” it should be “fake Austrian” or something that effect. Humor is another fatal weapon against these idiots like max Keizer and stacy Herbert
Anonymous

Popcorn time
Richard Carey

No, I think we really are dealing with a zombie. “Fake Austrian” is the kind of thing a zombie would say.
Mike

Agreed. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a George Romero movie.
jgvibes

JP Morgan funded Tesla too lol but then pulled his funding at a critical time as well…dont see anyone calling tesla a shill lol thanks for this though tom, i am obviously not a fan of RF and have gotten this criticism in the past..now i have a good retort
vox

For any non-zombie, it is so easy to spot the intellectual honesty of scholars like Woods and Hulsmann. Reading them confirms this for me, but they simply exude the best known truth when they speak. I can’t wait to get through Hulmann’s biography of Mises. It is an amazing book, but it will take me awhile. I can hardly resist reading about 3 books at a time.
Richard Carey

With such purile attacks, there are two ways of responding:

Ignore them – “Aha, so you don’t deny it, eh? Too scared to debate, huh?”

Swift rebuttal and exposure of the ridiculousness of the charges – “see how they leap to defend their god Mises. Those so-called Austrians and their obsessional religious cult.”
Mike

It’s impossible to debate with these people. Seems like they are having “their time of the month” every day.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Wayne-Walton/1569023277 Wayne Walton

Private bankers finance all sides in order to create Hegelian Dialects whereby they win no matter what. Private bankers control the People via debt, and interest. Private bankers are the sovereigns as they bankrupt governments via mathematic contract fraud of interest. Principle(P) + Interest(I) is impossible to pay as only the P is circulated once. The interest is not created, and all payments are not re-spent but re-loaned. This creates an un-payable debt Ponzi. It occurs with big govt, small govt, or no govt. It occurs on gold, silver, paper, or digits. It occurs with a Fed/govt monopoly/force/LaRouchian support. It occurs with “free market”/voluntary/private monopoly/Austrian support. Shall we have: Coke, or Pepsi? Democrat, or Republican? Liberal, or conservative? Shall we have govt monopoly, or private bank monopoly? LaRouchian un-payable debt/interest? Or, Mises un-payable debt/interest? Heads, the banksters win, tails the People lose. Did the banksters finance Mises? LOL! Of course they did. They finance all factions. They financed Tea Party, Occupy, AND Paul. They finance the peace movement, MIC, and the “radical Muslims”. AKA “Total Spectrum Dominance” Would “financial elite”/private bankers finance a group which supports voluntary interest based contract fraud? Would they finance a group which perpetually blames the patsy “government”; NOT banksters? How about a group which believes ONLY government creates monopolies?! As if private bankers wish to “compete” for profits in a “free market” rather than control of the planet. The same bankers who perped 9.11. Evil people can enslave the People with government, money control, and private banking. To say it’s simply one, or the other is to be resigned to being “divided and conquered” by the private usurers. Rockefeller “competition is a sin”. Elite private bankers have no intention of “competing” in a “free market”.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Wayne-Walton/1569023277 Wayne Walton

https://vimeo.com/39139892 George Soros, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Zoellick all love the Rothschilds international gold standard. In their own words. The banksters can enslave the People with INTEREST on gold, silver, paper, or digits. They can do it with, or without fractional reserves. They can do it with big, small, or no government. They can do it with force, or without. Don’t be Punk’d.
http://twitter.com/rzc24arcel Freedom and Shalom!

After reading your debate with Wayne and Anthony in an FB thread, I actually got confused coz I am just new to this Austrian/libertarian way of thinking. I was actually thrilled discovering this new thought and started to write July last year, but after encountering Austrian “debunkers” I was having second thought. That is because I haven’t read yet the works of the Austrian pioneers. Somehow, I follow you and see inconsistencies in the reasoning of those “debunkers”. I just want to say thanks. Grace and peace!
cassandra

mises was an accomplice of rockefeller and hostile elite. Independent Institute, a libertarian outfit has discussed these nefarious links extensively here:
http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=692

To know more about austro-libertarianism, click here:
http://toqonline.com/archives/v11n1/TOQv11n1Pert.pdf
here:http://toqonline.com/archives/v11n1/TOQv11n1MacDonald.pdf
and here:http://www.toqonline.com/archive/2011/spring-11/
Much of what Dr. Ron Paul wrote in his newsletters was right. Whites need to organize to advance their interests, their fertility, their homelands.
http://www.TomWoods.com Tom Woods

And in exchange for being Rockefeller’s “accomplice,” Mises was stuck in an unpaid position at NYU, in complete obscurity, for the rest of his career. You’d think he could have milked Rockefeller for a somewhat better deal than this. But of course, to think about this preposterous scenario at all is to realize its absurdity.
cassandra

Marxism became a world power (1917), long after Marx’s death (1883).
cultural marxism succeeded (1960s) long after Gramsci’s death, who was another obscure but lethal monster (1937).

Your imagination only accepts a plot where the ideologue (mises) is only motivated by financial or titular gain (from rockefeller), and nothing else. but that is gullible thinking.

the rockefeller-mises nexus is undeniable. just as neocon-iraq war nexus.

Obscurity does not constrain ideology. the plague of ideology travels and spreads long after its source dies.
http://www.TomWoods.com Tom Woods

The Rockefeller Foundation briefly funded Mises’ work because of his reputation as an economist. Then they dumped him. He taught the same things before, during, and after this period. That is the entirety of the connection. From this you are claiming that all of libertarianism is a Rockefeller front. Normal people are going to require a teensy bit more evidence than this.
cassandra

the proof of pudding is in the eating. commonsense tells us that in life, only cohesive people win.

I gladly concede that libertarianism is excellent on paper. It feels good. But that is not how anyone in animal kingdom down from eukaryotes to homo-sapiens have ever behaved.

humans are tribal in nature. And when one group (whites) are systematically indoctrinated with individualism, libertarianism, it weakens their ethnic cohesion and identity, inducing them to surrender their homelands, culture, interests, women and children to ethnic competitors.

Libertarianism is a front of hostile elite because it weakens western people, western civilization, thus easing the agenda towards white extinction. only cohesive white political action can prevent the white extinction.

libertarianism and totalitarianism are two ends of same axis of evil. I urge and challenge you to read the above links with same respect and decorum, as you expect neocons to proffer non-interventionists.
cassandra

even Marx taught the same things before, during and after.

just because mises did not change his line of thinking does not mean anything.

Rockefeller foundation supported him, but where is the evidence that they “dumped” him? May be they realized they should help him under the table, without public knowledge. may be they realized it was a strategic administrative error to publicly help mises in the first place.

it is well known that federal reserve was helping nixon white house under the table. may be in same fashion, Rockefeller swtiched to clandestine support of mises after officially “dumping” him.

the Independent Institute report on mises-rockefeller nexus may be the tip of the iceberg. only a true audit of mises and rockefeller would reveal the entire plot. even that is a long shot since mises is dead now and we cannot give him a lie detector interrogation test.
http://www.TomWoods.com Tom Woods

You mean the entire plot to write books on the epistemological foundations of economics? The plot is so deep, apparently, that it involves introducing concepts that 1% of the public is capable of understanding.
cassandra

sir, you may recall that Marx’s Das Kapital was not very appealing to masses either.

If a high proportion of that 1% public is gullible, then they would inhale, incubate and transmit austro-libertarian plague to white masses, by simplifying the language.

even the Chinese are more sane in that they opened special economic zones to see the effects of new concepts (markets) at a local level before spreading it all mainland china.

But here in America, you are preaching libertarianism before testing it on a small city. This is the ultimate foolishness.

Even drug companies are more responsible than you Dr. Woods. They test it on mice, monkeys, dogs, small set of humans, multi-stage clinical trials, before jumping the gun. And its still fails many times.

some concepts like hard-money, abolishing central-bank, property rights, free markets can be derived from commonsense and 6000 yrs of experience, which regrettably due to ideological overload, is so uncommon these days.

You contracted one ideological plague (neoconservatism), survived, and then contracted another (libertarianism).

i urge you to muster the same courage and mental balance to recover from this one.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Ted-Seay/699620427 Ted Seay

>That is because I haven’t read yet the works of the Austrian pioneers.

Start here:

http://library.mises.org/books/Henry%20Hazlitt/Economics%20in%20One%20Lesson.pdf

Then read this (and take good notes — highlight freely, especially the things you’re not sure you understand at first):

http://library.mises.org/books/Ludwig%20von%20Mises/Socialism%20An%20Economic%20and%20Sociological%20Analysis.pdf

…and have fun!
http://twitter.com/rzc24arcel Freedom and Shalom!

Thanks! ^_^