A Journal for Western Man-- Issue IX
Dr. Stephen Yates
Based on a presentation made at The Scholarship of Liberty Conference, The Twentieth Anniversary of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, October 18–19, 2002.
Western civilization, having achieved the highest standard of living in the world, is almost alone in having created and nurtured a large intellectual class: a group of people whose professions consist of working with and expounding ideas. This class includes college and university professors, administrators, commentators, a few journalists, activists, writers, artists, cartoonists, and so on, including those of us who do the lion's share of our work in research institutes or "think tanks."
To what can we attribute the high standard of living that gives rise to an intellectual class? To capitalism, of course. Even to the limited extent expansionist government has allowed capitalism to be practiced, it continues to be an engine of wealth creation and distribution.
Now I need hardly point out that many members of the intellectual class despise capitalism—sometimes passionately. Of course, many university professors and others who identify with the intellectual class subsist at the expense of the state, which means at the expense of taxpayers. This in itself inclines many of them to political and economic philosophies that favor expansionist government instead of economic freedom. But behind this bias there are others.
Karl Marx once said (in Theses on Feuerbach) that "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."
This statement, to my mind, offers important clues to two different categories of intellectuals. It isn't the difference between those who only want to interpret or understand the world and those who want to change it, although there are plenty of the former (they can be found, e.g., in departments of physics). Most intellectuals who turned their attention to questions of philosophy, economics and politics somewhere along the line did so because they wanted change.
One of the things that makes a person become an intellectual is dissatisfaction with the world in which he finds himself. If you are dissatisfied, you want change. But this begs the question: change toward what? And what things need to be taken into consideration when trying to get from point A to point B? The change we Misesians want is change toward more freedom, of course, instead of more statism.
Here is where things really get interesting. Consider Marx's remark more closely. It actually presents us with a false dichotomy. Constructive, hopeful change calls for understanding the world. The two aren't separate. This idea goes all the way back to Bacon's dictum that "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." This applies to human nature as well. Thus there are intellectuals who want to understand the relevant aspects of our world, and human nature, because they see this as a necessary condition for any sort of change that will make things better. Then there are those in the intellectual class who simply detest the world they find themselves in.
Many of the latter have ended up in universities because they would be unable to earn a living anywhere else. Whatever understanding they present amounts to rationalization for changes they think they can impose on the world in accordance with some theory—often one that, whether out of scorn or mere indifference, mostly ignores human nature as it is. Cultural Marxism is a perfect example.
Mises, of course, belongs in the former group, those who believe we have to understand the world in order to change it. Thus in Human Action and elsewhere he sets out to explain, starting from foundational premises and working upward, what capitalism is and how it works. He integrates an understanding of the world and human nature into a seamless whole.
In Mises's view, capitalism involves acting man, pursuing his ends, trading in value-for-value exchanges, because each believes he will benefit from the transaction. The market is a process coordinating millions of such exchanges. It is a constellation of millions of people buying, selling, hiring, working, and so on, trying to satisfy their needs and wants. The market process communicates to the observant what ought to be produced and in what quantity, what wages workers ought to be paid, and so on. The study of this process is called economics.
Now what is it that so many intellectuals of the Marxian stripe find so detestable about all this? As Mises observes, most clearly in his slim volume The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, capitalism allows the masses to satisfy themselves. Under pure capitalism, the masses trade with one another freely. They are not dictated to by an overlord who establishes what is to be produced and how people should spend their money.
Capitalism is the only system in history structured this way. It gave us a middle class—the much-despised bourgeoisie of Marxist ideology. Marx correctly noted that prior to the rise of capitalism there was no bourgeoisie. The free market created it, by freeing people's creative potential. Those who are most effective at reading what the market "says" and delivering something their fellows want will get rich—possibly even despite having been born into poverty.
Thus in capitalism we have an economic system developed that actually allows the poor to raise their own standards of living by their own efforts, by dealing with their fellows freely. Market processes do not coerce; they send signals. Some read these signals. Some don't. Some can't. Some simply won't.
Here we return to the intellectual class and its biases. Many intellectuals look down their noses at the masses. Intellectuals by nature share an interest in, and belief in, the power of ideas. They are right, but that isn't the issue. They don't perceive any such interest or appreciation in the masses.
It is true that the common man doesn't have a great deal of intellectual curiosity. Nor does he question the accepted practices of his society unless he perceives them going in the wrong direction (as many ordinary people do today). So the intellectual class separates itself from the masses and holds them in contempt. This contempt then transfers to the economic system that has done the most to benefit the masses by providing what they want and elevating the economic status of the providers.
Thus many intellectuals deeply resent a system that lavishes rewards on those who in some way serve the masses and withholds rewards from those who see themselves as above such things. They hate it when the marketplace makes Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez rich girls. They grit their teeth at how Danielle Steel sells more books than they could ever dream of selling.
How can a system be just, they go on, when professional athletes who didn't even finish their underwater-basketweaving university degrees sign multi-million dollar contracts while they, with their Ph.D.'s, languish in relative poverty? Is it fair, they demand to know, that Bill Gates is worth more than entire third world countries? Intellectuals blame capitalism for all this, and much more.
Capitalism rewards celebrities, however, because of the purchasing power of the masses, people the intellectuals see as beneath them. They cannot admit that they either can't or won't participate in this system and that the fault is theirs, not the celebrities or the masses. They believe this system rewards the "wrong" values, and this leads them to want to impose their values on the system as a whole—whether in the name of more tasteful music (by their favorite artists or composers, of course), better books than Danielle Steel's (theirs, perhaps), a better operating system than Windows (we're waiting), and so on.
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