Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic

Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic is out today in paperback; xx + 331 pages, 42 chapters, four appendices. A Kindle edition is in the works. The following paragraphs should answer basic questions like, “What’s this about?”

From my Introduction:

From March 8, 2011 to September 10, 2012, nineteen months in all, I blogged my criticism of The Church and the Libertarian, Christopher A. Ferrara’s slanderous and ignorant attack on the Austrian School of Economics. He argued that no faithful Catholic could be a sincere libertarian of the ASE persuasion. One day I had promised Mr. Ferrara that if he published a book to that effect, I’d answer it. Across almost ninety posts I fulfilled that promise, and this book reincarnates them.

After a year and a half, however, I decided that life was too short to sacrifice other projects on the altar of this polemic. The issues were (and are) important, and I found researching and writing about them congenial, but I could no longer sustain the effort. . . .

This book is the record of an effort in pro-market apologetics (in the classic sense of “defense against intellectual attack”). All interference in market exchange, not only outright state control of the “means of production,” but also violent robbery, involves a degree of “socialization” of the costs of acquiring a good or service. To impose costs on individuals who have not chosen to bear them, be they contemporaries or later generations, is to “socialize” those costs. Calculating these (usually hidden) costs falls to the economist. “Socialism” and “communism” are but frank labels for the systematic, territory-wide state interference with the market exchanges of individuals. That is, it differs in degree, not of kind, from the predations of garden-variety gangsters.

From Gerard Casey’s Foreword:

Anthony Flood’s Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic is a spirited and detailed defence of the fundamental compa­tibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism. . . .

Flood is critical not only of Ferrara’s conclusion, but also of the argumentative methods that Ferrara employs. “Several thorough readings,” writes Flood, “have convinced me that it is such a bad book, morally as well as stylistically, that it arguably ought to be ignored rather than critically reviewed. Its tone is continuously inflammatory, its arrangement of material lopsided . . . and his use of sources tendentious. The last-mentioned trait includes either unawareness or evasion of evidence relevant to his topic but inconvenient to his purpose.” Flood is especially critical of Ferrara’s epistemically uncharitable failure to employ responsible internal criticism of his opponents’ positions and also of his inadequate grasp of various historical controversies. . . .

Tony’s book will be of interest to many people, but perhaps especially (but not only) to those who are Catholic and who are also attracted to the intellectual coherence of Austro-Libertarianism, but are concerned that the two systems of thought may be irreconcilable. Polemical writing is not everybody’s favourite form of reading, but the multiple, mostly short, chapters of Christ, Capital and Liberty provide so many insights, engage the perspectives of so many thinkers and attack the central topic of the compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism from so many angles that no reader can fail to achieve a greater insight into the matter after reading it than he had before he began.

Gerard N. Casey MA, LLM, PhD, DLitt.
Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin
Associated Scholar, The Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama
Fellow, Mises UK

And finally, at least for this post, the table of contents:

Part One: Setting the Table

Chapter 1      A Question of Tone

Chapter 2      In Few Things, Charity?

Chapter 3      A Question of Competency

Chapter 4      Sound Bites, Panic Buttons, Scare Quotes

Chapter 5      An Inconvenient Jesuit

Chapter 6      An Overview of an Overview

Chapter 7      Demonize and Delete the Austrians

Chapter 8      Value-Laden and Value-Free

Chapter 9      Adventures in Meta-Ethics

Chapter 10    Aquinas’s Proto-Liberal Concerns

Chapter 11    An Inconvenient Anarcho-Catholic

Chapter 12    Doctorates, “Dummies,” and Defamation

Chapter 13    On Not Seeing the Forest for the Woods

Part Two: Main Course

Chapter 14    Capitalism: a Post-Christian Structure?

Chapter 15    Conflating Science and Ethics

Chapter 16    Disparaging Imaginary Constructions as Illusions

Chapter 17    “Statism” versus “Greed”

Chapter 18    Confusion or Calumny?

Chapter 19    The Kevin Carson (Side-)Show

Chapter 20    What Do We Mean by “The Free Market”?

Chapter 21    If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool-Ownership

Chapter 22    Rothbard on Enclosure

Chapter 23    The Hammonds, T. S. Ashton, and Emily Litella

Chapter 24    Grand Theft Monastery

Chapter 25    Dismissive of the New, Evasive of the Old

Chapter 26    Lie, Rinse, Repeat

Chapter 27    Sudha Shenoy on Enclosures

Chapter 28    The Gnat of Enclosure, the Camel of Slavery

Chapter 29    Lock(e), Stock, and Jesuit

Chapter 30    Slavery, Real and Bogus

Chapter 31    If This Is Infallibility . . . .

Part Three: Dessert and Leftovers

Chapter 32    Save Money, Live Better, Just Do It

Chapter 33    Corporations as “Psychopaths”

Chapter 34    Enclosing Debate

Chapter 35    Rothbard Shaves Ferrara’s Quasi-Marxist “Beard”

Chapter 36    Shall We Prefer Government by Naked Coercion?

Chapter 37    Slavery for the Corporation?

Chapter 38    The Corporation as “Sociopath”

Chapter 39    Railroading the Free Market

Chapter 40    (Fan)Fanning the Embers of Fascism

Chapter 41    Scrooge on Externalization

Chapter 42    Ferrara’s Reserve of False Notes

Appendices

Appendix A    Murray Rothbard on Abortion

Appendix B    A Profound Philosophical Commonality

Appendix C    Lord Acton: Libertarian Hero

Appendix D   Is Anarchy a Cause of War?

Lew Rockwell and the Story of the Ludwig von Mises Institute

Soon my autobiographical vignette of Murray Rothbard will join those of Herbert Aptheker, Sidney Hook, Bernard Lonergan, and Eric Voegelin. In preparation for that post I’m sharing, with the author’s permission, a recent letter from Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. the Founder and Chairman of the Mises Institute. It’s a fundraising letter, one to which I hope you’ll respond. But it’s more than that: it’s his personal story of Mises, Murray, and the Institute, one he must have told a thousand times, but never more vividly and concisely. Let’s listen to Lew. — AGF

November 13, 2018

Dear Friend,

When I met Ludwig von Mises, he was exactly as I had imagined him: kind, brilliant, dignified, beautifully mannered and dressed, a gentleman from what Murray Rothbard called “an older and better world.”Image result for the ludwig von mises institute His wife, Margit, had been an actress, and she had great beauty, intelligence, and presence as well.

Image result for margrit von mises

A genius, Mises was the greatest economist of the 20th century, and a hero in his courageous battles with Marxists, National Socialists, and Keynesians. Never did he put his own career ahead of teaching the truth, which he did in brilliant book after brilliant book. As a result, he never had the professorships and honors that were his due. Forced to flee the Nazi occupiers, he found American Keynesians a hostile bunch as well. So his career was stunted, but not his spirit, and not the legacy and example he left to all who cherish freedom.Image result for last knight of liberalism

Murray Rothbard I had the privilege of knowing well. He was funny, charming, and a genius, too. Like his mentor Mises, Murray suffered in his career for his integrity and truth-telling, which he also displayed in brilliant book after brilliant book. Even billionaire oligarchs couldn’t stop him. A model scholar, teacher, and polymath, he seemed, like Mises, to know everything.

Murray once told me he never heard Mises express any self-pity for his treatment, but only good will and determination. I never heard Murray express such feelings either. He was the happy warrior of Austrian economics and liberty. Continue reading “Lew Rockwell and the Story of the Ludwig von Mises Institute”