Mises’ Answer to Would-Be Conspirators: You Will Lose
From 2013.
Over half a century ago, Ludwig von Mises made a crucial observation.
The capitalistic social order, therefore, is an economic democracy in the strictest sense of the word. In the last analysis, all decisions are dependent on the will of the people as consumers. Thus, whenever there is a conflict between the consumers’ views and those of the business managers, market pressures assure that the views of the consumers win out eventually.
I have long believed he was correct. Like Mises’ disciple Murray Rothbard, I am a student of conspiracies. They all have this in common: they seek leverage through the state. They instinctively know that Mises was correct, that they are the servants of customers in a free market order. So, they seek to rig the markets by means of the state.
Once a person comes to grips with Mises’ observation, conspiracies appear less formidable. The state is a weak reed when compared to the long-run effects of liberty. The free market prospers under liberty. It expands its control over production and distribution.
This leads me to the topic at hand.
Alex Jones and Paul Watson wrote a really interesting report on the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. He is a big supporter of Obama. They say that he is behind a new organization, Zeitgeist. It is a supplement to the Bilderberg organization. It may be about to absorb Bilderberg.
I have been fascinated for almost half a century with the attempts of various conspiratorial groups to influence the affairs of men. This has been the goal of power-brokers for as long as we have records of human societies. The quest for power, by way of specialized knowledge and behind-the-scenes influence, goes back to the story of the Garden of Eden. Men are always trying to get shortcuts to power. They want to have inside information. They want to be the powers behind the throne, at least in those cases in which they are not convinced that they sit on the throne.
POWER AND THRONES
One of the basic themes of writers who specialize in conspiracy historiography is that the people on the thrones are really not the true source of their own power. It becomes difficult to maintain this when you are dealing with somebody like Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler. When you get a true megalomaniac on the throne of power, and he personally tells everyone what to do, on pain of death, it is difficult to maintain that there are any powers behind the throne. These rulers seem to have a kind of built-in sniffer that enables them to locate people who think they are the powers behind the throne, and those people tend to disappear.
Nevertheless, when it comes to the exercise of power, every person on a throne is dependent on information. The better the information he has access to, the more effectively he can wield power. The difficulty is this: people do not want to tell strongmen on the throne that what they had been told before is a pack of lies, or worse, utter nonsense. That can get you killed. So, the quality of the information that flows upward to the person on the throne is always suspect. So, the man on the throne attempts to have multiple pipelines of information. But the more pipelines of information there are, the more confusing events get.
The flow of accurate information is the crucial resource. The person without accurate information is flying blind. I think that this, more than anything else, is what brought down the Soviet Union in 1991. The more complex that a society gets, the more difficult it is to gain access to reliable information.
Then there is bureaucracy. It is difficult to enforce your decisions, no matter how powerful you are.
(To read the rest of my article, click the link.)
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