The Anti-Freedom Movement States Its (Worst) Case? ... Austrians Vs. the Illuminati

Proof Libertarianism Is an Illuminati Ploy ... So Jewish Supremacism can be retraced directly to the Austrian Economics' main proponent himself (Murray Rothbard) ... Libertarianism and Austrian Economics are not the products of maverick free thinkers. On the contrary, all leading proponents of the movement were highly connected individuals. In the early years the Volker Fund made available vast sums of money, because Austrian Economics was considered the right answer to communism, to maintain the dialectic the Money Power needs (also see: 'Banker explained 'Occupy America' Scam'). Far from a fringe movement, Mont Pelerin Alumni collected no less than eight Noble Prizes. Alan Greenspan testified of its pervasive influence by saying in 2000: "the Austrian School have reached far into the future from when most of them practiced and have had a profound and, in my judgment, probably an irreversible effect on how most mainstream economists think in this country." In this day and age when communism is no longer considered a threat, but with Marxism/Liberalism/Political Correctness a strong force in Western nations, Libertarianism has found a new lease of life as a way co-opting the resistance in the Alternative Media. The dialectic continues unabated. – Henry Makow

Dominant Social Theme: Freedom is government?

Free-Market Analysis: Social credit entrepreneur Anthony Migchels has authored a screed at HenryMakow.com entitled "Proof Libertarianism is an Illuminati Ploy." He also thanks a fellow who has often provided controversial feedback here at the Daily Bell, "Memehunter."

We don't doubt that both Memehunter and Migchels mean well (in the sense that they wish for human beings to progress toward more tolerable and "just" living conditions, worldwide) but we are puzzled about why they (and others) believe that by attacking the evolution of free-market thinking they are providing a service to those who support freedom in the alternative media.

Migchels' article seems basically a restatement of another article by "Anonymous" that was published in May 2011 and has had circulation on such websites as the Democratic Underground. We have read other, similar statements recently on the Internet as well. So for purposes of identification, we will refer to those who espouse these views as "anti-libertarians."

It would be easy – too easy, in fact – to attack the motives and backgrounds of those who espouse these views – even Henry Makow himself, who is providing a platform for these perspectives and has his own problems of late. (Memehunter, too, with whom we are more than familiar.) But we will do our best in this article to restrict our criticisms to what has been actually presented.

One needs to combat pernicious ideas (in our opinion) with facts if possible rather than ad hominem arguments. First, let us figure out the background of "social credit." Here are excerpts of a profile of social credit's founder, C.H. Douglas, taken from Wikipedia (but seemingly well sourced nonetheless):

C. H. Douglas was born in either Edgeley or Manchester, the son of Hugh Douglas and Louisa Hordern. Few details are known about his early life and training; he probably served an engineering apprenticeship before building an engineering career that brought him to locations throughout the British Empire in the employ of electric companies, railroads, and other institutions ...

Douglas concluded ... the economic system was organized to maximize profits for those with economic power by creating unnecessary scarcity. Between 1916 and 1920, he developed his economic ideas, publishing two books in 1920, Economic Democracy and Credit-Power and Democracy, followed in 1924 by Social Credit. Freeing workers from this system by bringing purchasing power in line with production became the basis of Douglas's reform ideas that became known as Social Credit.

There were two main elements to Douglas's reform program: a National Dividend to distribute money (debt free credit) equally to all citizens, over and above their earnings, to help bridge the gap between purchasing power and prices; also a price adjustment mechanism, called the Just Price, which would forestall any possibility of inflation. The Just Price would effectively reduce retail prices by a percentage that reflected the physical efficiency of the production system.

Migchels has explained that his version of social credit is free-market oriented and "private," but Douglas's certainly does not seem to be. We can see from this brief description that Douglas apparently intended to use social engineering (government power) to redistribute wealth via a "national dividend" and also via his idea of a "just price" that would fix prices across a given society. 

Of course, price fixing via force is likely, in our view, to further distort an economy, not bring it justice. As Adam Smith (and then others) showed, the only methodology of true economic growth resides in the marketplace itself, which can efficiently distribute capital via the Invisible Hand of competition. Without competition, one simply has the hand of man. The "hand of man" (government) murdered some 150 million people in the 20th century.

The articles of late, promoted by those we are calling "the anti-libertarians," seem to us to be espousing a power elite dominant social theme; they evidently seek to discredit about 50 years of theoretical progress in the freedom movement that has seen the rise of Austrian, free-market thinking and the spread of the concepts of human action and the business cycle.

Contrast free-market thinking with Douglas's theories of social credit. Human action, as conceived by the Austrians, points out that individuals are the prime actors within an economy. There is no such thing as "government," in fact. Government is "we" – individuals.

Our choices, in fact, seem relatively simple. Either individuals will work cooperatively and peacefully via enlightened self-interest to pursue their aims and goals or they will in some sense attempt to inflict their private agendas on others via force. In the modern era, this sort of force has been administered by government – what we call regulatory democracy. It is force, nonetheless.

Douglas and his theories are very obviously to be administered via official power. There is no other way that we can see to "redistribute wealth" via a "national dividend" than by taking money from some and giving it to others. His just price is surely not meant to be a "suggestion," either.

It seems to us that anti-libertarians who espouse social credit and other social-engineering schemes are inevitably suggesting that force be used to bring people in line with their views of how society should operate.

Is this an encouraging approach when it comes to reinforcing human freedom? We're more comfortable with the considerable body of modern libertarian thought that promotes individual liberty and the idea that people ought to organize societies as much as possible to reject coercion and violence.

In fact, free-market thinking is an ancient conversation. One can trace it back to the Greeks and likely beyond that. Modern free-market thinking may have gotten its start in Spain or in France where the French philosophists opposed Napoleon.

Adam Smith contributed to free-market thinking with his Wealth of Nations and later the Austrian free-market school developed the theory of marginal utility, which is the dividing line between static classical economics and neo-classical economics.

Neo-classical economics is based on the idea that markets provide price discovery. While rulers can fix prices by decree, such price-fixing is inevitably a wealth redistribution that takes wealth from its creators and hands it over to those who didn't create it and likely won't utilize it as efficiently.

Austrians such as Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser elaborated on free markets, entrepreneurship and the mechanisms of economic growth. The most famous 20th century exponents of Austrian economics were FA Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and, later on, Murray Rothbard.

Mises further developed the theory of human action that holds people themselves are the prime influencers of the economy (how could it be otherwise?). FA Hayek and Mises together developed the theory of the business cycle that shows clearly how central banks overprint money, leading first to booms and ruinous busts.

The only way to end the terrible (central banking) business cycle is to allow money to operate freely within a free-market environment. Fixing the volume or value of money via any government monopoly scheme is bound to cause more misery, not less.

Murray Rothbard is well known for his late 20th century influence, which included helping to found formal Libertarianism – an anti-government movement based on the principals of free-market economics – and participation in the founding of the Ludwig von Mises Institute as well.

The Ludwig von Mises Institute, styling itself as "anti-state, anti-war and pro-market," is also the brainchild of Lew Rockwell. Interestingly, while some of the modern progenitors of Austrian economics were Jewish, Lew Rockwell is a devout Catholic.

Catholicism is deeply rooted in Rockwell's conception of Austrian economics; he even identifies the Spanish Jesuits as playing a role in the founding of what eventually would become modern, free-market thinking.

Under Lew Rockwell, the Mises Institute and his own LewRockwell.com website, has recruited such intellectual "paleo-conservative" stars as Patrick Buchanan, whose Catholicism is very much part of his larger sociopolitical orientation, and Thomas Woods, a devout Catholic whose scholarly work has often focused on the Church via such books as How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization and The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy.

Ironically, it could be said that currently the thought leaders of free-market economics are increasingly Catholic: Anti-War's founder Justin Raimondo (a confidant of Rothbard's) was "raised Catholic" and Rockwell's Paleo-Conservative movement has a distinct Catholic subset. (Would the anti-libertarian crowd characterize them as crypto-Jews?)

This brings us, of course, to another disturbing facet of the current anti-libertarian movement – its determination to equate free-market thinking with a "Jewish Illuminati." Anti-libertarians seem to believe that because some modern Austrian economists were Jewish, the entire 2,000-plus-year-old evolution of free-market thinking is to be invalidated as a power-elite plot.

The argument currently being made is that the modern free-market philosophy is actually an elite creation intended to provide a dialectic between the forces of elite-managed totalitarianism and freedom-oriented thinkers such as Rothbard. These latter individuals are conceived as tools of the elite, intent only on confusing people and priming them for further anti-freedom takeovers.

It is ironic, however, that these arguments are being made by anti-libertarians who want to utilize government itself as a mechanism of monetary equality. The same modern history that shows us that governments conspired to murder some 150 million in the 20th centuryinforms us that government is not to be trusted when it comes to supporting and advancing the cause of liberty.

We are well aware that prominent alternative media facilities routinely characterize the evident and obvious Anglosphere conspiracy to create global governance as "Zionist." We have argued that this conspiracy is a good deal broader than a single religion or ethnicity.

The one-world-order conspiracy may have at its core a group of intergenerational families that control central banking around the world but it is aided and abetted, apparently, by factions of the Vatican and other religious elements as well as non-Jewish corporate, military and Intel enablers and colleagues.

To call this complex amalgam of interest and ethnicities "Zionist" is to simplify a complex phenomenon. Much as the Italian mafia hires Italians, so those involved in the one-world-order conspiracy prefer to work with people of their own religion and ethnicity. Those at the top are running a CRIMINAL conspiracy, not a religious one. These people USE religion, and even encourage anti-Semitism, ironically. They are not "of" religion, not by any means.

Nonetheless, the anti-libertarians continue to emphasize an apparently Zionist/Jewish argument by conflating the modern freedom movement with "Illuminati Jews." In our view, this does an injustice to liberty's greater conversation and even its modern, 500-year-old pedigree.

To buttress arguments that free-market thinking is a Jewish plot, anti-libertarians have now constructed a specious (in our view) alternative history of freedom's modern evolution. These articles tend to begin (nowadays) with someone called William S. Volker (1859-1947) "a wealthy German-Jewish businessman." Volker is supposed to have led the charge for an Illuminati-created freedom movement:

Far from defending freedom, the Illuminati created Libertarianism to reflect their Social Darwinian and racial supremacist ideology. With its opposite twin, Communism, they control the dialectic ... "These two contraries, like Bolshevism and ourselves, find their identity in the International."

According to anti-libertarians such as Memehunter, David Rockefeller himself personally funded Ludwig von Mises when he arrived in the United States, broke and out-of-work, and Volker, apparently a modern-day Illuminist, also funded von Mises as well as Murray Rothbard.

The anti-libertarians also argue that such entities as CATO, funded by the neo-libertarian Koch Brothers, are actually part of a larger elite dialectic. Of course, there is no doubt that the elites HAVE tried to set up a dialectic using various free-market elements and individuals.

From our perspective, FA Hayek cooperated with some of these efforts, as did the Chicago Freshwater School led by Milton Friedman. Friedman, for instance, could never bring himself to disavow central banking entirely, arguing instead for a "steady state" central bank that would mechanically inject a certain amount of money into the economy.

Some have made the same accusations about the Mont Pelerin Society and the Austrian element at George Mason, and its mission to "professionalize" Austrian economics. The answer to these charges, when it comes to the Rothbardian/Misesian School of Austrian, free-market economics, is fairly straightforward. Both Rothbard and Mises were fairly incapable of compromising their personal beliefs for social gain and evanescent wealth.

Mises himself disavowed the Mont Pelerin Society when he reportedly stormed out of a meeting shouting, "You are all socialists!" Mises, too, (contrary to Memehunter's assertions in these pages) was never funded directly out of David Rockefeller's pocket and eventually all funding from the Rockefeller Foundation is said to have been terminated.

Murray Rothbard was fired by the Volker fund honchos in the early 1960s, just as he was fired from CATO in the early 1980s (a few years after CATO's inception) by the Koch Brothers along with Lew Rockwell when the two men refused to significantly soften their "hard" freedom-oriented positions, especially as concerned their principled opposition to the elite's cash-cow, central banking. The result, in fact, was the Mises Institute.

None of this is hidden information. Rothbard, Rockwell (and Mises), determined to go their own way, rejected elite establishment funds and prominent elite positions. Rothbard eventually helped found the Libertarian Party, which is the precursor to the modern US anarchy movement. Mises, of course, created his masterwork, Human Action, (much hated by elites, as it remains formally unpublicized), along with the anti-central-banking business theory that has been driving the elite establishment nuts for decades.

Rockwell, a devout Catholic, has been significantly responsible for spreading the doctrine of freedom – real freedom – around the world for years via the Mises Institute and Lewrockwell.com. His Catholic colleague Justin Raimondo founded Anti-War.com.

Free-market thinking, a concept with a 2,000-year-old pedigree, has virtually exploded in the past decade thanks to the Internet. To argue that the current freedom movement is merely an outgrowth of a shadowy US "German-Jewish" banker, William Volker, is to entirely miss the point about what's going on.

Human beings are not perfect creatures, of course. The Rothbard Misesian focus on a gold standard runs counter to neo-Austrian thought on the value of competing currencies and even private fractional reserve banking. But Rothbard was apparently shifting his views on these issues before his death; Rockwell and libertarian Congressman Ron Paul have stated more flexible views as well.

Yet there is nothing remotely wrong with suggesting that gold and silver have a place within a free-market money environment. History shows that this is the case. However, any sort of mandated or government approved gold standard would be price-fixing and would present some of the same problems, sooner or later, as the current central banking regime.

Some other issues ... anti-libertarians believe that "most leading Libertarians are or were Jewish." But the modern movement of libertarian/conservative scholarship and principled anti-war activism is led by four Catholics, Raimondo, Rockwell, Buchanan and Woods. (Maybe freedom is not specifically a Jewish preserve after all ... )

Rothbard and Mises are said to have been funded throughout their careers by the Rockefellers and the Koch Brothers. But anyone who actually bothers to read the history of these relationships will find out that both scholars were fired by the very individuals and foundations that were supposedly their supporters.

Finally, as a free-market publication we should deal with the issue of Rothbard's "racialism" (whatever that means) as mentioned in several anti-libertarian articles. In fact, free-market theory tells us clearly that people are social and cultural animals.

People, in fact, tend to stick together and absent government coercion will seek out those of their own kind – whether it be as regards skin color, religious preference or various cultural elements.

This clear and salient observation can be lost in accusations of racism, but the principled libertarian stance is that people ought not to be forced to live in ways they don't want to or in places where they don't wish to. This no doubt is Rothbard's larger point, and certainly it's not racist to point it out. (Or certainly not more so than to point out that the founder of social credit apparently referred to the Protocols of Zion for inspiration.)

What is more disturbing than Rothbard's supposed "racialism" (in our view) is the growing drumbeat of anti-Jew prejudice within the context of the alternative 'Net media. Whether it's "Jewry" or assertions that "all Jews" subscribe to the mysterious Protocols of Zion, anti-Jew sentiment is definitely on the rise.

Here at the Daily Bell, we're starting to get our share of it. In fact, many who participate in DB's brief are not Jewish, either formally or informally. We believe, in fact, that the state of Israel should be secularized and we believe that at the core of the criminal power elite there is a significant Jewish element. We haven't been shy about stating it.

Our feedbacker "friend" Memehunter, who is apparently anti-Jew (though he claims to be Jewish), once pointed out on these pages that Austrian Economics was invented in the late 1920s as a result of a pan-European movement. He later partially retracted the statement, which he then tried to blame on the irrepressible and sometimes inaccurate Eustace Mullins.

We would tend to believe that such claims, because they are inaccurate (even profoundly ignorant), are bound to fail. In fact, Carl Menger, commonly held as the founder of the school, did not approach his investigations into marginal utility religiously but as an economist.

Now, it's been pointed out that Menger and other early Austrians were involved with the power elite of the day. But this, too, is a kind of specious logic. The kind of classical liberalism and republicanism that is reflected in Austrian, free-market economics goes back to the Greek "Golden Age" and beyond.

So ... the conversation of freedom is an ancient one. To try to collapse a 2,000-3,000 year old conversation into a 150 year time frame in order to make it appear linked to a modern elite conspiracy is to argue in bad faith, in our view.

The Austrians, especially the modern Misesian-Rothbardian school, have made significant contributions to it in the modern era by stating (restating) important elements of REAL economics. Their contributions cannot be denied; their observations cannot be minimized by rewriting history to make it look as if the purest expression of scholarly free-market thinking (the Rothbardian-Misesian school) is merely a dialectical, elitist strategy to denude us of our "freedoms."

The real question, in our view, is why would anyone want to do this? What is it about modern free-market thinking – an extension of people's natural yearning to live as they choose within cultural and familial associations – that arouses such vituperation? Is it because anti-libertarians want to build a case for government activism? (And, again, why would they? What appeals to them about authoritarianism?)

The modern power elite reigns via mercantilism. As we've pointed out plenty of times, government, especially big government, is bound to be taken over – dominated – by elite forces. The best way to deal with government is to make it as small as possible while seeking to live (ourselves) in small, flexible and self-sufficient communities. Why does such a solution arouse antipathy?

Conclusion: To insinuate (or even state, as anti-libertarians are now doing) that the millennia-old freedom conversation, with contributions (in the West) from Greeks, Romans, Catholics, Europeans and Americans, is a modern outgrowth of Illuminati strategic destruction is not only inaccurate, it is worse. It is profoundly, well ... banal. And banality, in some of its forms, is plain evil.