It's A Battle Of Ideas

I am often asked how a "political party" can be formed to take free market ideas forward in India. Since there are many here who are attempting just this, I thought these extracts from Ludwig von Mises' Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (pdf here) would help guide public thought on these issues. Here is the first quote:

There can be no more grievous misunderstanding of the meaning and nature of liberalism than to think that it would be possible to secure the victory of liberal ideas by resorting to the methods employed today by the other political parties.

This book was written in 1927, and it contains some very interesting remarks about European political parties at the time, in "multi-party democracy":

There are a great number of parties, and each particular party is itself divided into various subgroups, which generally present a united front to the outside world, but usually oppose one another within the party councils as vehemently as they oppose the other parties publicly. Each particular party and faction feels itself appointed to be the sole champion of certain special interests, which it undertakes to lead to victory at any cost. To allot as much as possible from the public coffers to "our own," to favor them by protective tariffs, immigration barriers, "social legislation," and privileges of all kinds, at the expense of the rest of society, is the whole sum and substance of their policy.

This was Europe - and it sounds familiar to us here.

What does a classical liberal stand for? Just this: the abolition of all privileges, especially through tariffs. A completely free market. And equality of all before Law. Mises goes on to say some important words on how the classical liberal candidate will differ from the rest:

Liberalism does not have the least thing in common with any of these parties. It stands at the very opposite pole from all of them. It promises special favors to no one.... Because of this, liberalism finds itself, from the very outset, in a peculiar position in the competition among parties. The antiliberal candidate promises special privileges to every particular group of voters: higher prices to the producers and lower prices to the consumers; higher salaries to public officeholders and lower taxes to taxpayers. He is prepared to agree to any desired expenditure at the cost of the public treasury or of the rich. No group is too small for him to disdain to seek its
favor by a gift from the pocket of the "general public." The liberal candidate can only say to all voters that the pursuit of such special favors is antisocial.

These quotes are all from the chapter on political parties. Mises says that it is because of these antiliberal political parties that there exists a "crisis in parliamentary democracy" - and this was in 1927! What is required is the active promotion of the Idea - that freedom is best, that special privileges are antisocial, that free trade is advantageous, that Private Property must be inviolable, and so on. If these ideas are promoted to the extent that there occurs a "revolution in public opinion," then only can the triumph of classical liberalism happen. This is the goal towards which this blog is dedicated. Of course, we prefer to use the word "libertarian" today, because "liberals," at least in the USSA, are entirely "socialist."

Mises says that only if this revolution in public opinion occurs, can parliamentary democracy be saved. Then, all parliamentarians will uphold the correct principles. And society will not be duped by the antiliberals. All government rests on public opinion.

Of course, the "crisis in parliamentary democracy" that Mises wrote about in 1927 has now become a full-blown catastrophe that is destroying the whole of civilization with all its "capital consumption." The good book for our times is Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed. You can buy this very important book in India here.