Author: M Barbu

My article “The Education of the Modern Socialist” deserves a follow-up. The first part showed that a change has occurred in the definition of “socialism”—a necessary change in view of the failures of this ideology during the last century. Socialism today is based on the ideology of “statism”—the conviction that the state must play a fundamental role in society. Ludwig von Mises’s wider definition of socialism as state intervention implies a modern social state that is involved in most if not all of the activities of society, whether commercial or not.

Libertarians often wonder why socialism continues to be so popular, even though it has proved to be such a failure as a political ideology and as an economic system. Though a public education system and a biased mainstream media are key reasons for this, the stubborn resiliency of socialism is also somewhat fictitious since socialism has evolved: the socialist of yesteryear is not the socialist of today. This distinction is important to remember when setting the themes for a libertarian education.

We now turn our attention to what happens with an increase in the money supply, rather than an increase in savings. This is critically important. The mercantilist idea that increasing the money supply increases prosperity was exposed as an error centuries ago by Richard Cantillon.1 However, modern mainstream economists, including the monetarists, Keynesians of various sorts, and the now-fashionable market monetarists, fully embrace the idea that printing money is necessary for prosperity.

In concluding part I of this study, we quoted then-Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger, who observed that the setup of the US national security system made sense “when most conflicts were regional” in scope and nature.