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Old July 20th, 2009 #1
Mike Parker
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Default Can Jew Mises be Baptized?

Sunday, November 09, 2008

Can Mises be Baptized?

There is no doubt that the Catholic Church supports the idea of a just social order, and has expounded on that order in the great Social Encyclicals. However, and despite more than 100 years of constant Papal teaching on this subject, the average Catholic—indeed, the average Bishop—is confused about it meaning or even unaware of its existence. Most preaching concerns personal sin without ever considering the social implications or connecting sin to a violation of a just social order. And yet, this is strange, since what makes a sin sinful is that it violates what the right order between a person and his neighbor and his God. Without a violation of this order, a thing cannot be sinful. This is expressed negatively in the Ten Commandments (“Thou shalt not kill, steal, covet, etc.”) and positively in the Sermon on the Mount (“do good to those who harm you...” etc.) However, rather than stress the social damage that sin causes, preaching most commonly connects it only with our ultimate destiny to heaven or hell. And while this is legitimate in itself, it strips Catholic teaching of its more immediate values.

Church teaching does not, by itself, dictate a particular social or economic system; it only lays down the criteria by which any social or economic system is to be judged. It is up to the laity to devise systems in their own social and historical context that meet with the criteria. Most often, this task is refused. It is not that Catholics are not heavily involved in the political and social life of the nation. But often that involvement is disconnected with their religious beliefs and with Church teaching. Many such examples can be found on the left, but the greatest example can be found on the right, specifically the attempt to baptize the essentially pagan economics of Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School.

Much of the Catholic intelligentsia has surrendered to this doctrine. The Austrian Catholic right boasts names like Michael Novak, George Weigel, Thomas Woods, Murry Rothbard, to name but a few. Further, these scholars are supported by well-funded institutes such as the Acton Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Institute, the Liberty Foundation, and a host of others. Money flows like water for these people, usually corporate money, water largely used in an attempt to baptize Mises. Still, there is one scholar who was absolute in his opposition to such a notion, who declared, over and over again, the fundamental opposition between the Austrian School and any genuine understanding of Christianity.

That scholar was Ludwig von Mises.

Mises recognized that Austrian order and Catholic order would always be at odds. “A living Christianity,” said Mises, “cannot exist side by side with, and within, Capitalism” (Quoted in Jorg Guido Hulmann, Mises, the Last Knight of Liberalism, p. 982). Later in his career, Mises would allow that Christianity could exist within capitalism, but only if the Christians kept their opinions to themselves, only if they were marginalized and kept apart from the political and economic orders. As Murry Rothbard admits, Mises considered himself a “man of 1789, an heir of the Enlightenment, (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard169.html),” that is, a man of the French Revolution. And the great advantage of the French Revolution was that it destroyed the older social order in general and the social authority of the Church in particular. As Mises himself put it, “for us and for humanity there is only one salvation: return to the rationalistic liberalism of the ideas of 1789.”

Mises's antipathy towards Christianity begins with his disdain for its founder.

[Jesus] rejects everything that exists without offering anything to replace it. He arrives at dissolving all existing social ties…. The motive force behind the purity and power of this complete negation is ecstatic inspiration and enthusiastic hope of a new world. Hence his passionate attack upon everything that exists. Everything may be destroyed because God in His omnipotence will rebuild the future order…. The clearest modern parallel to the attitude of complete negation of primitive Christianity is Bolshevism. (Socialism, p. 413)

Another thing about Jesus that rankles Mises is his attitude towards the Rich:

Jesus's words are full of resentment against the rich, and the Apostles are no meeker in this respect. The Rich Man is condemned because he is rich, the Beggar praised because he is poor…. In God's Kingdom the poor shall be rich, but the rich shall be made to suffer. Later revisers have tried to soften the words of Christ against the rich … but there is quite enough left to support those who incite the world to hatred of the rich, revenge, murder and arson…. This is a case in which the Redeemer's words bore evil seed. More harm has been done, and more blood shed, on account of them than by the persecution of heretics and the burning of witches. They have always rendered the Church defenceless against all movements which aim at destroying human society. The church as an organization has certainly always stood on the side of those who tried to ward off communistic attack. But it … was continually disarmed by the words: “Blessed be ye poor; for yours is the Kingdom of God.” (Socialism, p. 420)

Mises rejects Christian love as the basis of social order, and reduces it to self-interest and the fear of violence:

Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment to love one another… [People] cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiment but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society…and to substitute peaceful collaboration to enmity and conflict. (Human Action, p. 168-9)

Now, one may agree or disagree with Mises in all of this, but in either case it simply cannot be reconciled with Catholic Social Teaching. It is not even, as Murray Rothbard notes, conservative in any possible meaning of that term. It is, rather, the quintessence of Enlightenment Liberalism, the French Revolution continued in our day.

The surrender to the Enlightenment among Catholic intellectuals on the right is more or less complete. For example, Michael Novak, a nominal Catholic, notes that an attempt “to try to run an economy by the highest Christian principles is certain to destroy both the economy and the reputation of Christianity” (The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, p. 70). For Novak, there is no sacred canopy that covers society, but only an “empty altar” in which each man places the idols of his own choosing. Religion in this case is not really the repository of truth, but merely a consumer product giving the purchasers whatever satisfactions they desire; theology gets replaced by marketing. This narrowing of the sacred, Novak tells us, requires “not only a new theology but a new type of religion” (Novak, p. 69). Not that Christianity would be done away with; it would be allowed to modify itself to conform to the new ideology:

Yet if Jewish and Christian conceptions of human life are sound, and if they fit the new social order of pluralism, the widespread nostalgia for a traditional form of social order may be resisted…For the full exercise of their humanity, being both finite and sinful, free persons require pluralist institutions (Novak, p. 69-70).

For this “new theology” and “new religion,” Novak finds it necessary to drain Christian dogmas of their original meaning and convert them into mere supports for corporate capitalism. The Trinity, for example, is only a “symbol,” since “no one has ever seen God” (Novak, p. 337). The point of this symbolic Trinity is to teach us about pluralism. The Incarnation is the sign of religious futility: it is no longer the salvific act of a loving God but the ultimate demonstration of the futility of good intentions.

The point of the Incarnation is to respect the world as it is, to acknowledge its limits… and to disbelieve any promises that the world is now or ever will be transformed into the City of God. If Jesus could not effect that, how shall we? ...The world is not going to become—ever—a kingdom of justice and love (Novak, p. 341).

I might point out to Mr. Novak that Jesus isn't dead yet, or rather, he isn't dead again, despite the neoconservative attempts to kill him off. He lives on in his Eucharist and in His Church, but the life of His Church waxes and wanes with the faith of His followers, and with their ability to transform the gospel from the printed page to the social order. But this is not likely to happen so long as the Austrian neoconservatives have such sway in Catholic intellectual circles. What is needed is a revolt of the masses in favor of the Mass, and for making the Eucharistic vision a part of social, economic, and political life. What is needed is what Benedict XVI calls Eucharistic consistency. For this we have a model. Not indeed a modern model, but an effective one nevertheless. She was not an intellectual; indeed she was a mere peasant girl. But she was given, in a single instance, a vision of the full meaning of the Incarnation and its social implications. She gave full answer to the neoconservatives, to both Mises and Marx. Her words were:

My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior.

For he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.

Behold! From this day all generations will call me blessed; The almighty has done great things for me and holy is his name.

He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation.

He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things while the rich he has sent away empty.

He has come to the help of his servant Israel, for he has remembered his promise of mercy, the promise he made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children forever.

On their best days, neither Mises nor Marx wrote anything this good. All the money in corporate capitalism cannot buy a single drop of holy water with which to baptize Ludwig von Mises, and Mises would be the first to agree. The attempt to do so has made the Catholic politics of the right incoherent and therefore rendered it impotent; at best account, it is a mere appendage to corporate capitalism.

Posted by John Médaille at 11/09/2008 10:23:00 AM

http://distributism.blogspot.com/200...ptized_09.html
 
Old July 20th, 2009 #2
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Ludwig von Mises: the kosher Nietzsche. Here is the nexus between WN/NS and Conservatism.

BTW, how does Distributism prevent 'degeneration' into feudalism, capitalism or socialism? I mean, suppose the crops of the family farm fail, can the homesteader sell his farm to a rich farmer, and become a farmhand, or can he expect a handout from the government?
 
Old July 20th, 2009 #3
Alex Linder
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All the soul-saving done by Catholics over 2,000 years never produced 1/1000th the solace provided by the greed-driven corporate selfishista who invented the air conditioner.

All the market needs is the restraint of a racial nation, to be redundant. Within that context, the Catholics can go off and found their own communities, if they wish to live as serfs and monks. Me, no thanks. I'm willing to fight not to live in a Catholic nation. Get your jeboo off my property or I'll turn the hose on it.
 
Old July 20th, 2009 #4
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Everybody wants to distribute, nobody wants to produce.
 
Old July 20th, 2009 #5
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Capitalism worked just fine up until 1965 when the jews overturned immigration law. At the very height of capitalism, in the 20s, before all the socialism set in, there were no capitalist firms at all puling for open borders at the Congressional debate - there were only kikes fresh off the boat sneering at nativists who succeeded in keeping the US White for another forty years. Blaming capitalism for failed politics is exactly like blaming guns instead of niggers. Capitalism is an engine. It can be constrained to power a weedeater or a world empire. All depends what the people in charge want.
 
Old July 20th, 2009 #6
Rick Ronsavelle
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Here is a working link for the Rothbard article:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard169.html

What is the complaint? Those wanting to renounce, to live on voluntary communes will be free to do so. Nothing, including capitalism, markets, fractional reserve, or religion will be crammed down anyone's throat.

btw Austrian economics was founded by (Gentile) Carl Menger:

Carl_Menger Carl_Menger
 
Old July 20th, 2009 #7
Rick Ronsavelle
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October 21-24, 2009
Salamanca, Spain

Supporters Summit 2009 and Awarding of Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Liberty

"One of the great discoveries of the 20th century concerns the origins of economic science in the late middle ages in Spain and Italy. Long before Adam Smith wrote, many scholastics from the 14th through the 17th centuries were writing systematic economic theory.

No spot on the planet was as fruitful as the School of Salamanca in Spain. Here was the world center of economic research. The writings by the intellectuals gathered here explained price, value, money and its function, saving, entrepreneurship, inflation, contract and exchange, and so much more - and they closely engaged the modern world that was being born at that time, providing at theory and a rationale for the rise of prosperity.

As Murray Rothbard demonstrated in his tremendous treatise on the history of thought, these thinkers were the predecessors to modern Austrian School theory.

What's more, the late scholastics of the School of Salamanca agreed on the damage that government intervention did in the course of economic affairs. They saw the blessings of liberty as an extension of the blessings of God. Therefore, there is a sense in which Salamanca is also the origin of modern libertarian theory."

http://mises.org/events/118
 
Old July 21st, 2009 #8
Mike Parker
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NS, Catholic distributism and Islamic Sharia all have similar views on usury and financial speculation. These are very different systems of ideas but what they have in common is that their societies stress the community over the individual. If you look at the ideas and societies that favor usury and speculation, you find: diaspora Jews like Mises, who use them as weapons of ethnic warfare; Calvinists, who emulated Jews as a function of their religion; and today's secular liberalism, in which people emulate Jews as a function of the Jewed culture.
 
Old July 21st, 2009 #9
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The Nazis were wrong on speculation. Speculation is precisely what you need to develop minds sharp enough to defeat the jews. Speculation makes sharp minds because they must be completely attuned to reality, whereas the religious mindset weakens minds because it keeps them floating in fantasy.
 
Old July 21st, 2009 #10
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"...stress the community over the individual. . ."

This means state coercion is stressed over the individual. This derives from the anti-rational epistemology of socialism.

Anti-individual means anti-reason, and anti-reality. The Nazis openly attack reason.
 
Old July 21st, 2009 #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick Ronsavelle View Post
"...stress the community over the individual. . ."

This means state coercion is stressed over the individual. This derives from the anti-rational epistemology of socialism.

Anti-individual means anti-reason, and anti-reality. The Nazis openly attack reason.
It's easy to let what exists blind us to what could be. The technology we now have, combined with the economic and racial knowledge we now have, points out what is entirely possible - whites living in small, independent states, federalized for racial defense.

The religious faith in regulation will not bear intellectual scrutiny any more than the Jesus myth.

WN who want totalitarianism are as uninterested in economic laws as libertarians are uninterested in racial laws.
 
Old July 21st, 2009 #12
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WN divides into those with a loser mentality and those with a winner mentality.

The loser mentality wants the same kind of government we have now, without the jews and the niggers they privilege.

The winners don't want that. They recognize that government is demonstrably defective every single one of its functions, hence close to unnecessary. White men + freedom + technology = no need for government. All we need from federal or national government is racial defense. Below that, the form that fits white men is decentralization. Let them pick the kind of state they want to live in. Let the losers set up a microstate in which they duplicate the failed 'public schooling' + democracy we enjoy now. I and many others will go the other way - no welfare, no government schools, no million regulatory bodies, no taxes.
 
Old July 21st, 2009 #13
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Actually, no economy can run without speculation. Some Soviet economists came to the 'Kwa in the sixties, saying that they could not allocate (ration) crops over the year, and that they wanted to know how we did it.

And the answer is- futures markets.

Last edited by Rick Ronsavelle; July 21st, 2009 at 12:28 PM. Reason: picture failed to appear
 
Old July 21st, 2009 #14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
Capitalism worked just fine up until 1965 when the jews overturned immigration law. At the very height of capitalism, in the 20s, before all the socialism set in, there were no capitalist firms at all puling for open borders at the Congressional debate - there were only kikes fresh off the boat sneering at nativists who succeeded in keeping the US White for another forty years.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the "Asian Exclusion Acts" that were passed in the U.S. and Canada in the early 20th Century were enacted under pressure from socialist groups and parties, who were concerned that letting Asians in would make it impossible for white workers to earn decent living wages. It was the capitalists (for lack of a better word) who were bringing the Asians here for cheap labor.

Not that different to the situation today with Mexicans being brought in for cheap labor (though with "free trade," companies can just move their operations offshore and don't have to bother bringing people in anymore).
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Old July 21st, 2009 #15
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick Ronsavelle View Post
btw Austrian economics was founded by (Gentile) Carl Menger:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Menger
I'm starting to wonder if jews have ever been given credit for an idea that wasn't taken from a gentile.
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Old July 21st, 2009 #16
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I've wondered the same. The second Austrian was goy Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk-

"The first volume of Capital and Interest, which Ludwig von Mises decreed as "the most eminent contribution to modern economic theory", titled History and Critique of Interest Theories (1884), is an exhaustive study of the alternative treatments of interest: use theories, productivity theories, abstinence theories, and so on."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_von_Böhm-Bawerk
 
Old July 21st, 2009 #17
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Default Chinese Exclusion Act

Got the dates wrong in my previous post; those acts were passed in the late 19th Century, not the early 20th.

From Wikipedia (bearing in mind that Wikipedia has an anti-white bias):

Quote:
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law passed on May 6, 1882, following revisions made in 1880 to the Burlingame Treaty of 1868. Those revisions allowed the U.S. to suspend immigration, and Congress subsequently acted quickly to implement the suspension of Chinese immigration, a ban that was intended to last 10 years.
Quote:
The Chinese came to America in larger numbers during the 1848 California Gold Rush and in the 1860s when the Central Pacific Railroad recruited large labor gangs to build its portion of the Transcontinental Railroad. Large-scale immigration continued into the late 1800s, with 123,201 Chinese recorded as arriving between 1871 and 1880, and 61,711 arriving between 1881 and 1890.

At first, when surface gold was plentiful, the Chinese were well tolerated and well-received.[1] As gold became harder to find and competition increased, animosity to the Chinese and other foreigners increased. After being forcibly driven from the mines, most Chinese settled in enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, and took up low end wage labor such as restaurant work and laundry. With the post Civil War economy in decline by the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by labor leader Dennis Kearney and his Workingman's Party[2] as well as by California Governor John Bigler, both of whom blamed Chinese "coolies" for depressed wage levels. Another significant anti-Chinese group organized in California during this same era was the Supreme Order of Caucasians with some 64 chapters statewide.
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Old July 21st, 2009 #18
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It's no doubt a great embarrassment to socialists and leftists today that the original socialists/labor movements were racist as hell, just as it no doubt embarrasses modern feminists that most of the "first wave" feminists were racist. Didn't Karl Marx have some unkind things to say about niggers as well?
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Old July 21st, 2009 #19
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Default Chinese Immigration Act

This is why I was confused about the dates:

Quote:
The Chinese Immigration Act, 1923, known in the Chinese Canadian community as the Chinese Exclusion Act,[1] was an act passed by the federal government of Canada, banning most forms of Chinese immigration to Canada. Immigration from most countries was controlled or restricted in some way, but only the Chinese were so completely prohibited from immigrating.

Prior to 1923, Chinese immigration was already heavily controlled by the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, which imposed a hefty head tax on all immigrants from China. After various members of the federal and some provincial governments (especially British Columbia) put pressure on the federal government to discourage Chinese immigration, the Chinese Immigration Act was passed.
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Old July 21st, 2009 #20
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There's a booklet by Robert Jarvis called The Workingman's Revolt: The Vancouver Asiatic Exclusion Rally of 1907, and a few years ago there was an excellent article on this subject by Paul Fromm in Ed Field's newspaper. Haven't had any luck finding copies online, though.
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