Is the Market a Test of Truth and Beauty?

ȃȄǿ Partʺʺ: Politics and Philosophy

Some passages from hisNation, State, and Economydocument Mises’s

rejection of slogans and intuitions as a basis for policy and his focus on

likely consequences.

Rationalist utilitarianism rules out neither socialism nor imperialism on

principle. Accepting it provides only a standpoint from which one can

compare and evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the various

possibilities of social order; one could conceivably become a socialist or

even an imperialist from the utilitarian standpoint. But whoever has once

adopted this standpoint is compelled to present his program rationally.

(ȀȈȀȈ/ȀȈȇȂ, p.ȁȀȀ)

Utilitarianism has been reproached for aiming only to satisfy material
interests and for neglecting higher human goals. It is true that liberalism
and utilitarianism aim at the highest possible productivity of labor. But
they know “that human existence does not exhaust itself in material plea-
sures. Ļey strive for welfare and for wealth not because they see the high-
est value in them but because they know that all higher and inner culture
presupposes outward welfare.... Utilitarian policy is indeed policy for this
earth. But that is true of all policy” (ȀȈȀȈ/ȀȈȇȂ, pp.ȁȀȃ–ȁȀȄ).
It is an absurd confusion of values and positive knowledge, Mises
wrote, when insistence on the economics relevant to some policy issue
is criticized as “insensitive.” If dispelling economic fallacies “is inhuman,
then so is every expression of truth. If to say this is inhuman, then the
physicians who exploded the myth of the healing power of mandrake were
inhuman, too, because they hurt the people employed in gathering man-
drake” (ȀȈȈǿ, p.ȁȂȃ).
Mises used to say that various interventionist measures could be re-
jected on the basis of economic analysis and the value judgments of their
advocates.

[A]ll the methods of interventionism are doomed to failure. Ļis means:

the interventionist measures must needs result in conditions whichfrom

the point of view of their own advocatesare more unsatisfactory than the

previous state of affairs they were designed to alter. Ļese policies are

therefore contrary to purpose. (ȀȈȁȁ/ȀȈȇȀ, p.ȃȇȅ)

ŏŞŕŠŕŏŕşř śŒ řŕşőş’ş ŜśşŕŠŕśŚ

For many decades, utilitarian ethics has had a bad press, not least in liber-

tarian circles. It draws scorn as the mindset of crass, grasping, unprincipled