How Ludwig von Mises Dispels Current Myths About Capitalism

0:00We want to leave some time for discussion and it's 4.25 and the session ends at 4.45. So I don't think I'm going to give my whole paper at this point and really I don't mind because my main purpose was just to be here and to attend the conference. So I think what I'll do is I'll take, I'll try to limit myself to no longer than 10 minutes and just make some commentary Now, I was sort of quickly sitting here and watching the time go by, I re-thought my paper and I originally wanted to talk about how Ludwig von Mises dispels myths about capitalism, but if most of you have read his works then you've probably read this and I have not much new to say.

0:47But one thing that I would like to say is that reading Ludwig von Mises, and here I'm I'm talking from personal experience and I'm talking from the heart, not as a scholar. It has a therapeutic value. And reading Ludwig von Mises, when I read him, I had a healing experience and I understood myself better and I understood a lot of my resentments, the envy I had within me, resentments I had within me and many other things. And I first started reading this author two years ago, so this is a fairly recent thing. And I'd just like to make another comparison. On the way down here on the plane, I read a book, not from Ludwig von Mises, but written by a psychiatrist. This book just came out in Canada about a month ago. It's written by a French-Canadian psychiatrist who has many years of experience. He's about 70 years old. And he wrote a book about the benefits of smoking for some people. And of course, he says, as a doctor, he says he understands

1:47is better not to smoke, but in treating many patients he said that people who are depressive often they don't know it and they smoke because nicotine acts as an antidepressant and he says it's a less worse drug than many of the others that doctors prescribe for depression. And this doctor too also said that new research has shown that nicotine stops Alzheimer's, slows Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease and these are other topics, we can't in the book where he talks about the entrepreneur because he's treated many entrepreneurs in his life and he says that the portrait of an entrepreneur, the character of an entrepreneur, the personality of an entrepreneur, he says is very similar to the personality of an artist. They are basically artists and he says many artists, it's known that many artists suffer from depression and to sort of to overcome their depression, they create works of art, They write books, they do paintings, they do a lot of things like this.

2:47And he said he had one client who was an important entrepreneur and he asked his client once, his patient, what do you do to get over depression? And the entrepreneur said, well, I buy another company. And reading Ludwig, so you can see that person who is in entrepreneurial activity, they're They're not there to exploit necessarily just for the money, but that's what they are. They are artists. And the first book I read by Ludwig von Mises was The Anti-Capitalist Mentality. That book came into my hands by coincidence and I was almost like blushing when I was reading it because I was one of those intellectuals who persecuted capitalists at one time in my life.

3:33Basically, as a teenager, I had read Ayn Rand and I think I was a libertarian when I was a teenager, but then I went to university and I was trained by the Jesuits and of course they told me not to read that trash and I just, it just, I had forgot about it and also I was one of those that was saying, yeah, the capitalists and yeah, they just sit back and they live off their interests and it's also easy and I had this mentality maybe for for about 20 years until my wife and I bought a little business and tried to become capitalists ourselves. And then we saw that it's not so easy and money just doesn't fall from the sky. And so Ludwig von Mises in his book, The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, in the first part of the book, he really goes into, he says, why do people loathe capitalism and why do intellectuals loathe capitalism? And he says, first of all, in capitalism, there's

4:29There's no excuses. In the case society, in former times, in the feudal society, you could say, well, I'm poor because I'm born into the wrong case, or I'm a serf or something like this. But in capitalist society, all are equal under the law. And we all have maybe not equal chances, but we all have a chance to better our lot in life. And he says often it's just a lot of petty resentments that two people may start out equally, one gets The intellectual class, for example, normally like the universities are quite left-wing or most faculties are quite left-wing, and he goes into a lot of, and this was my situation too, being in a very left-wing environment, I'm a professor of philosophy, and he says, well, like, basically, blue collar workers, they don't really get into contact with the boss or the director.

5:25The CEO. But if you're an intellectual, you are mixing in higher circles and you can't understand why some guy who sells laundry detergent can make ten times your salary. And though you figure, well, then something has to be wrong with the system because I'm part of the intellectual elite in society and how come I cannot have the same, have the, reap these same benefits and have the same kind of life. And many other things that Ludwig von Mises teaches. So like I said, when I read him, For me it was a therapeutic experience, I understood myself better, I understood resentments that I had, dissatisfactions that I had and it was, this is I think rare, rare is the writer or scholar who does both, who can give you a lot of factual information and teach you a lot but at the same time whom you can read and almost like experience a conversion and feel yourself having become a better person or having like made progress in your own personal

6:28life because of having read this author and I think I'll stop there so we'll leave time for the discussion there were a lot of important topics.