Like Dr. Mises’ other books, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality makes the incontestable point that the West owes its tremendous economic development, its machine technology, its inventiveness, its high standards of living, its many amenities, its surging populations, its low death rates, its good medical care and its nonfatalistic outlook to the rise of laissez faire capitalism. True, the totally unhampered operation of laissez faire has never persisted for very long anywhere in the West. But there has been enough of it to “absorb” the hindrances created by such things as uneconomic wage rates enforced by political action, or government subsidies, or tariffs, or the “wage tax” out of which social security is supposed to be paid.

Decade by decade, the capital equipment available to the individual worker in the West, particularly in the United States, has increased, thus adding to the unit productivity of wage earners who would otherwise be condemned to static standards of living. None of this has been done by mirrors, or by politicians; it has been done by saving, by the march of depositors to the banks with their pennies, nickels, and dollars. The sum total of productivity might, indeed, have been pushed much higher if the high tax philosophy of modern governments had not intervened.

In pushing up the average man’s standard of living modern capitalism has “exploited” nobody. As Dr. Mises says, under laissez faire the consumer is king. The only way a capitalist can become richer is by selling to the masses. He must lower the unit price of his goods in order to widen his markets and make more money. And he must pay high wages in order to attract the most efficient workers. The capitalist’s riches depend on making everybody richer in terms of goods, services, and wages. There is thus no inherent “class war” under laissez faire; the “system,” so-called, is all of a piece. The rich merely grind their own faces when they attempt to grind the faces of the poor.

The strange thing about it, however, is that the more capitalism succeeds in augmenting the individual’s blessings, the more it is libeled and hated. Not even the stupendously obvious failure of socialism in Russia, or the apathetic tincture of life in the so-called “welfare states” of England and Scandinavia, has done much to mitigate the hatred. This paradoxical state of affairs was first noted by Professor Schumpeter of Harvard, who surmised that capitalism would probably kill itself out of a surfeit of success. Dr. Mises, picking up from where Schumpeter left off, has made himself a pathologist of the queer, thoroughly irrational hatred which is engendered by the good tidings of plenty which capitalism brings.

According to Dr. Mises, the chief reason why capitalism is hated is that it deprives incompetents of easy excuses for their failures. Under feudalism, the underling could explain his lack of riches or a privileged position by his birth; after all, nobody could be blamed for his father’s failure to be a duke. But under capitalism, which awards people according to their accomplishments, the underling must either face up to his own ineffectiveness or else lie to himself M and to others. Dr. Mises says that capitalism creates inferiority complexes in people who haven’t the moral stamina to fight against the sins of envy, malice, and hatred.

At the very dawn of laissez faire capitalism a German, Justus Moser, wrote that life in a society in which success would exclusively depend on personal merit would simply be unbearable. The unsuccessful, said Moser, would feel themselves insulted and humiliated. They would go hunting for scapegoats. Dr. Mises evidently doesn’t think much of Moser’s bias against the merit principle, but he does credit Moser with a brilliant insight into psychology. A hundred and fifty years of history in which envious intellectuals have agitated the masses by inveighing against “management,” “capital,” “Wall Street”—and, most recently, “Madison Avenue”—have only served to enhance Moser’s reputation as a prophet.

The “anti-capitalistic” front which specializes in spreading lies and delusions about capitalism includes artists, writers, professors, people of stage and screen, and the “idle rich” whom Dr. Mises calls “the cousins”—i.e., the relatives of those who do the actual work of running great enterprises. These people are the leaders in the attempt to manipulate the enviousness of the average man to the end of leading him into the blind alley of socialism. Dr. Mises heaps magisterial scorn on leftward-looking “intellectuals” who obviously have no intellects, and upon wealthy people of “position” who haven’t the brains to come in when it rains. Much of his book is devoted to flaying these characters alive for their suicidal stupidity. They do not even seem to realize, he points out, that under communism they would be the first to be liquidated.

With Dr. Mises’ fundamental thesis, that people misread their hands when they oppose capitalism, I have no quarrel. And I am by no means blind to the role which envy and malice play in the creation of socialists and interventionists. But Dr. Mises makes a mistake, I think, in sticking to glaring primary colors in his analysis of the anti-capitalistic mentality. What he sets down to envy, or to a personal unwillingness to face the truth about one’s own incompetence, is, in many instances, nothing more than a simple failure to think in terms of true causes and true effects. Much of the opposition to capitalism stems from the “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” fallacy: people see the facts of personal failure and attribute them to the antecedent fact that capitalism has been the “going” system of production. They lack the logical capacity to dig beneath the surface of events to the true inwardness of capitalism’s largesse. When they have suffered enough under the high taxes and the inflation required to operate a Welfare State, they may use “post hoc” thinking to turn the rascals of State Welfarism out. This happy consummation won’t necessarily come about because of any improvement in the average man’s logical faculties; it will merely be a swing-of-the-pendulum thing. But in this case the “post hoc” mentality will be right by accident. Maybe, some day, an educated choice will replace the accidental.

Another reason besides envy for the failure of capitalism to sustain itself is the short-term cupidity of capitalists who, while they know that market freedom is a most desirable thing, think they can get away a little bit longer with a subsidy or a tariff or some other bit of government-created monopoly or special privilege. Added together, the many seemingly innocuous drives for personal exemption from market forces act as a terrible drag on the performance of capitalism. It isn’t necessarily envy or malice or hatred that causes the farmer to ask for price supports or the business man to seek a tariff; it is simply the universal desire for a handout. Indeed, the people who take the handouts are frequently capitalism’s loudest supporters in the abstract.

Much of what Dr. Mises thinks is anti-capitalist venom is merely cupidity set forth in the most plausible terms which a subsidy-seeker can think up. The farmer knows he can’t justify a fixed price for his cotton or his wheat by saying he wants more money without working for it. He has to make his cause seem noble by saying something high-flown, such as “the stability of the economy depends on a prosperous agriculture.”