Excerpt from The Return to Sound Money, by Ludwig von Mises

The following is from: http://mises.org/daily/2365

"The Integral Gold Standard

Sound money still means today what it meant in the nineteenth century: the gold standard.

The eminence of the gold standard consists in the fact that it makes the determination of the monetary unit's purchasing power independent of the measures of governments. It wrests from the hands of the "economic tsars" their most redoubtable instrument. It makes it impossible for them to inflate. This is why the gold standard is furiously attacked by all those who expect that they will be benefited by bounties from the seemingly inexhaustible government purse.

"The advocates of public control cannot do without inflation. They need it in order to finance their policy of reckless spending and of lavishly subsidizing and bribing the voters."
What is needed first of all is to force the rulers to spend only what, by virtue of duly promulgated laws, they have collected as taxes. Whether governments should borrow from the public at all and, if so, to what extent are questions that are irrelevant to the treatment of monetary problems. The main thing is that the government should no longer be in a position to increase the quantity of money in circulation and the amount of checkbook money not fully — that is, 100 percent — covered by deposits paid in by the public. No backdoor must be left open where inflation can slip in. No emergency can justify a return to inflation. Inflation can provide neither the weapons a nation needs to defend its independence nor the capital goods required for any project. It does not cure unsatisfactory conditions. It merely helps the rulers whose policies brought about the catastrophe to exculpate themselves.

One of the goals of the reform suggested is to explode and to kill forever the superstitious belief that governments and banks have the power to make the nation or individual citizens richer, out of nothing and without making anybody poorer. The shortsighted observer sees only the things the government has accomplished by spending the newly created money. He does not see the things the nonperformance of which provided the means for the government's success. He fails to realize that inflation does not create additional goods but merely shifts wealth and income from some groups of people to others. He neglects, moreover, to take notice of the secondary effects of inflation: malinvestment and decumulation of capital.

Notwithstanding the passionate propaganda of the inflationists of all shades, the number of people who comprehend the necessity of entirely stopping inflation for the benefit of the public treasury is increasing. Keynesianism is losing face even at the universities. A few years ago governments proudly boasted of the "unorthodox" methods of deficit spending, pump-priming, and raising the "national income." They have not discarded these methods but they no longer brag about them. They even occasionally admit that it would not be such a bad thing to have balanced budgets and monetary stability. The political chances for a return to sound money are still slim, but they are certainly better than they have been in any other period since 1914."

--http://mises.org/daily/2365

THE FIAT MATRIX

And so you take the red pill, ascend out of cave, and your eyes begin to adjust. Have you ever wondered why all those entities which were born to help and exalt mankind now exalt debt, as student loan debt skyrockets even as less and less is taught and jobs dry up; and as medical care bankrupts so many common workers who aren’t getting the taxpayer and Fed bailouts and fresh cash hot off their printing presses, but who, instead, are doing all the work and paying the taxes that bail out the banks? Have you ever wondered why the man of the year is not Corporal Jason L. Dunham, who selflessy jumped on a grenade and gave his own life to save his fellow marines, but the man who created more debt—the very opposite of wealth—than any other bureaucrat in the history of all mankind? Have you ever wondered why over 50% of all marriages now end in divorce, and why so many children are growing up fatherless, divorced from their Natural Rights set forth by both Moses and Homer? Have you ever wondered why the words of our Founding Fathers, and greats such as Hemingway, Aristophanes, Dante, Copernicus, and Edison are no longer taught; and why Mises, Hayek, and Schumpeter were never taught to begin with? Did you ever puzzle why they had to deconstruct Homer, Shakespeare, Smith, Voltaire, Webster, and Shaw? Do you wonder why the MBA programs want to chain you to that lower form of entrepreneurship, never teaching you of that far higher and more enduring entrepreneurship of Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer?
It is because the greats spoke out against the debauched form of entrepreneurship which tries to trump all other forms of true entrepreneurship with a printing press and a police force, converting mere debt into physical wealth by the conscious, orchestrated inflation and creation of wealth-transferring fiat bubbles. Did you ever wonder who funded the deconstruction of the classical, epic, manly soul; of fatherhood and motherhood, and the notion of private property rights for artists and creators?

The directors of such companies (joint-stock corporations), however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own .... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less in the management of the affairs of such a company? –Adam Smith, The Wealth on Nations, 1776

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. –Thoms Jefferson in 1802 in a letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin

Fair dealing leads to greater profit in the end. –Homer’s Odyssey

Thou shalt not steal. –Moses, Exodus

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration. –Mises

The authors of the Constitution were very much aware of the dangers of inflation and the need for commodity money. Destruction of the continental dollar was vivid in their minds. The journals of the Continental Congress noted that “paper currency… is multiplied beyond the rules of good policy. No truth being more evident, than that where the quantity of money. . . exceeds what is useful as a medium of commerce, its comparative value must be proportionately reduced.” Further, inflations “tend to the depravity of morals, and decay of the public faith, injustice to individuals, and the destruction of the honor, safety, and independence of the United States.” --R. Paul, End The Fed, The Constitutional Case, p. 165

If you are in debt, you are a slave to that debt. –Benjamin Franklin

The second vice is lying, the first is running in debt. . . Lying rides upon debt’s back. –Franklin

Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value—zero. —Voltaire

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists. –Ernest Hemingway

You have a choice between the natural stability of gold and the honesty and intelligence of the members of government. And with all due respect for those gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, vote for gold. –George Bernard Shaw
If ever again our nation stumbles upon unfunded paper, it shall surely be like death to our body politic. This country will crash. –George Washington

To emit an unfunded paper as the sign of value ought not to continue a formal part of the Constitution, nor even hereafter to be employed; being, in its nature, pregnant with abuses, and liable to be made the engine of imposition and fraud; holding out temptations equally pernicious to the integrity of government and to the morals of the people. –Alexander Hamilton

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. This issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of the moneyed corporations which already dare to challenge our Government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. –Thomas Jefferson

I see in the near future a crisis approach which unnerves me and cause me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations (of banking) have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic destroyed. –Abraham Lincoln

History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance. –James Madison

All the perplexities, confusion and distresses in America arise not from defects in the constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. –John Adams

The gold standard has one tremendous virtue: the quantity of the money supply, under the gold standard, is independent of the policies of governments and political parties. This is its advantage. It is a form of protection against spendthrift governments. . . The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard. –Ludwig von Mises

Of the innumerable evils which usually brings the decadence of kingdoms, principalities, and republics, the four greatest are, in my opinion: war, immorality, infertility of the land, and the debasement of money. For the first three, the evidence is obvious. But for the fourth, which concerns money, except for a few men of intellect, few people ever see it. Why? Because it is not in one fell swoop, but gradually, by a somewhat latent character, it ruins the state. –Copernicus

The themes of this paper are simple—the study of economics is incomplete and quite tragic without the classical, heroic, Austrian spirit contained in the words of the Greats. Gresham’s Law stipulates that bad money drives good money out of circulation; and I contend that a fiat currency drives soul, honor, and the classical, epic spirit out of the culture; exiling Aristophanes et al., and replacing Homer with feminist lit and Grand Theft Auto—two sides of the same coin:

I'll tell you what I think about the way
This city treats her soundest men today;
By a coincidence more sad than funny,
It's very like the way we treat our money.
The noble silver drachma that of old we were
So proud of, and the recent gold coins that
Rang true, clean-stamped and worth their weight
Throughout the world, have ceased to circulate.
Instead the purses of Athenian shoppers
Are full of shoddy silver-plated coppers
Just so, when men are needed by the nation,
The best have been withdrawn from circulation.
—Aristophanes, The Frogs, 400 BC

Dante recognized that in order to prop up the false value of their fiat regime, the MBA must naturally commit violence against art—one can see the financial motivations for the deconstruction and dumbing down of the academy—for the removal of Zeus’ lightning and Moses’s thundering justice—for the concerted attack on the exalted, masculine soul which passes judgment on FRAUD:

The monstrous shape lands on the brink and Virgil salutes it ironically. It is GERYON, the MONSTER OF FRAUD. Virgil announces that they must fly down from the cliff on the back of this monster. While Virgil negotiates for their passage, Dante is sent to examine the USURERS (The Violent against Art). . . These sinners sit in a crouch along the edge of the burning plain that approaches the cliff. Each of them has a leather purse around his neck, and each purse is blazoned with a coat of arms. Their eyes, gushing with tears, are forever fixed on these purses. Dante recognizes none of these sinners, but their coats of arms are unmistakably those of well-known Florentine families. . . Having understood who they are and the reason for their present condition, Dante cuts short his excursion and returns to find Virgil mounted on the back of Geryon. Dante joins his Master and they fly down from the great cliff. . . Their flight carries them from the Hell of the VIOLENT AND THE BESTIAL (The Sins of the Lion) into the Hell of the FRAUDULENT AND MALICIOUS (The Sins of the Leopard). –p. 133, The Divine Comedy (The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso) by Dante Alighieri and John Ciardi

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Juvenal asks. “Who will watch the watchmen?” “We will!” the fiat MBA is taught to respond, as every crises they create is used as reason to expand their power, as the words of Thomas alva Edison—the hodler of 1,000 patents and founder of General Electric is exiled from the academy.

Tom Paine has almost no influence on present-day thinking in the United States because he is unknown to the average citizen. Perhaps I might say right here that this is a national loss and a deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, 'the United States of America.' But it is hardly strange. Paine's teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind. We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed Paine devised and wrote. The deeds of one in the Weld were matched by the deeds of the other with his pen. Thomas Edison in The Philosophy Paine, 1925

People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest ...But here is the point: If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets the money broker collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%. Whereas the currency, the honest sort provided by the Constitution pays nobody but those who contribute in some useful way. It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People. If the currency issued by the People were no good, then the bonds would be no good, either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan. — Thomas A. Edison

If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves. –Thomas Edison

For there are vast profits to be made in catching the common man in the crossfire—in both creating messes and cleaning them up—in inflation and deflation—in the bait and switch—in the marriage and divorce—taking the common man’s pensions, savings, and homes on the way there via mere lawyerly decree, and his taxes and freedoms on the way back, as the Constitution, culture, country, and currency are all debauched so as to serve the counterfeit regime and the artificial business cycles it imposes to 1) convert mere fiat into physical wealth, and 2) transfer wealth toward the printing press and its well-paid architects at the top of the vast pyramid scheme, built upon groupthink fiatocracies all united in dismissing truth and honor; and which, tragically, must share the fate of all pyramid schemes, hollowing out the home, family, church, and very soul of a nation along the fiat descent. Indeed, the final chapter of Moby Dick comes to mind:

A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. –Moby Dick

But one does survive to tell the tale, and my class so oft opposed by those who know not what they do, I shall now shout these words to the eternities, so that thousands of years from now, scholars will remark upon the enduring vitality Bogle’s Battle and Socrates’ soul, which will soon trump the fiat administrators, who have no power to debauch these words, but only their own private souls, culture, and currency, as they “tauntingly follow the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars.”
And I only am escaped alone to tell thee. –Job
The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?— Because one did survive the wreck. –Epilogue Moby Dick
Pride goeth before the fall, and on the way down, there are also vast profits to be made in expanding the problems one purportedly seeks to solve—all that is required is a lack of honor, soul, and character, which the undergraduate education conveniently does away with, and which the MBA recruiter hires and promotes. The temptations are just too great, and even Alan Greenspan, who fueled the most epic bubbles ever known to mankind—bubbles which transferred trillions of dollars to the honor-free doublespeakers, wrote in his younger, more idealistic years (before he put on the One Ring and was transformed into Gollum):

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good, and thereafter declined to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as a claim on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard. --Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan, 1966

Austrian Economics Entrepreneurship: Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter: "The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail" --Joseph Schumpeter

Austrian Economics Entrepreneurship: Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter: "The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail" --Joseph Schumpeter

http://artsentrepreneurship.com
http://herosjourneyentrepreneurship.org

Hero's Journey MBA
"The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail" --Joseph Schumpeter

Austrian Economics Entrepreneurship
The Greatest Investment Autumn, 2008
by Dr. Elliot McGucken

Entrepreneurship cannot be taught. But in no way does this mean there is nothing to teach in a class devoted to entrepreneurship. We must teach of liberty's ideals and the precepts underlying our precious, exalted freedom. We must battle for the soul of capitalism; and this has ever been done best by those brave men who acquainted themselves with the classics' immortal ideals in books written pages, and then took rugged action in rendeirng those ideals real in living ventures, as did our Founding Fathers.

Thus a class devoted to Entreprneurship--to the supposed bottom line--is actually a class devoted to the higher ideals. And so it is that I flipped the script on the modern university, by sneaking the Great Books back onto the debt-based campus in a Trojan Horse called The Hero's Journey in Arts Entreprenuership & Technology.

As the winds are forever shifting throughout the financial world, oft opposing the more constant winds in that higher, ethereal realm, a greater, more-enduring investment is to be found in a classical liberal arts education. For Socrates reminds us that virtue does not come from wealth, but that wealth and every lasting good of man derives from virtue:

For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons and your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue come money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, my influence is ruinous indeed. But if anyone says that this is not my teaching, he is speaking an untruth. Wherefore, O men of Athens, I say to you, do as Anytus bids or not as Anytus bids, and either acquit me or not; but whatever you do, know that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times. --Socrates, The Apology

The Great Books have been hedged against and shorted across all realms, and now is a great time to buy in--right on the cusp of a renaissance in classical honor, integrity, and character. All the classics in my Hero's Journey in Artistic Entrepreneurship & Technology class can be purchased for less than the typical textbook--most can be downloaded for free--and the ideals contained within their pages will last a lifetime, providing sublime mentorship in all endeavors.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue. --Plato

"What warrants success in a fight for freedom and civilization is not merely material equipment but first of all the spirit that animates those handling the weapons. This heroic spirit cannot be bought by inflation." --Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 469

"The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders." --Ludwig von Mises

The great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law. --Hayek

We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty (including the trade unions), which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible.Those who have concerned themselves exclusively with what seemed practicable in the existing state of opinion have constantly found that even this has rapidly become politically impossible as the result of changes in a public opinion which they have done nothing to guide. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. --F.A. Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967)

A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom. --F.A. Hayek

Keynes did not teach us how to perform the miracle . . . of turning a stone into bread, but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn. --Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, p. 71 Keynes

A work of art is an attempt to experience the universe as a whole. One cannot analyze or dissect it into parts and comment on it without destroying its intrinsic character. --Ludwig von Mises

Economic affairs cannot be kept going by magistrates and policemen. --Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 282 Coercion

Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them. --Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p. 311 p. 314

Ludwig von Mises --"An entrepreneur cannot be trained." Human Action p. 311 p. 314

Ludwig von Mises The creative spirit innovates necessarily. It must press forward. It must destroy the old and set the new in its place.. Progress cannot be organized. --Ludwig von Mises, Socialism p. 167 Genius

One cannot organize or institutionalize the emergence of new ideas. The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science Ludwig von Mises p. 129 Ideas

A nation cannot prosper if its members are not fully aware of the fact that what alone can improve their conditions is more and better production. And this can only be brought about by increased saving and capital accumulation. Planning for Freedom pp. 92-93 Material Well-Being --Ludwig von Mises

The general intellectual climate which this produces, the spirit of complete cynicism as regards truth which it engenders, the loss of the sense of even the meaning of truth, the disappearance of the spirit of independent inquiry.... Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but one which can be found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith and who are acclaimed as intellectual leaders even in countries still under a liberal regime. --F.A. Hayek

In the etatist state entrepreneurs are at the mercy of officialdom. Officials enjoy discretion to decide questions on which the existence of every firm depends. They are practically free to ruin any entrepreneur they want to. They had the power not only to silence these objectors but even to force them to contribute to the party funds of nationalism. --Mises

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. --Thomas Jefferson in 1802 in a letter to then Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin

The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. --Mises

Individualism resulted in the fall of autocratic government, the establishment of democracy, the evolution of capitalism, technical improvements, and an unprecedented rise in standards of living. It substituted enlightenment for old superstitions, scientific methods of research for inveterate prejudices. --Mises

It was in the climate created by this capitalistic system of individualism that all the modern intellectual achievements thrived. --Mises

"The system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not." --F.A. Hayek

"Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow." --Ludwig Von Mises

"[Socialists] promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office." --Ludwig Von Mises

If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization. --Ludwig von Mises, Government and Civil Society

"Economics deals with society's fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen." --Ludwig von Mises

"Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process." --F.A. Hayek

"I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions. This is a belief deliberately maintained by the other side because if they admitted that the issue is not a scientific question, they would have to admit that their science is antiquated and that, in academic circles, it occupies the position of astrology and not one that has any justification for serious consideration in scientific discussion. It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide. Conversation at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. (9 February 1978); published in A Conversation with Friedrich A. Von Hayek: Science and Socialism (1979)" --F.A. Hayek

"If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants." --F.A. Hayek, Nobel Lecture of December 11, 1974, The Pretence of Knowledge

Murry Rothabrd wrote, "The Mises Institute's coat of arms is that of the Mises family, awarded in 1881 when Ludwig von Mises's great-grandfather Mayer Rachmiel Mises was ennobled by the Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria. In the upper right-hand quadrant is the staff of Mercury, god of commerce and communication (the Mises family was successful in both; they were merchants and bankers). In the lower left-hand quadrant is a representation of the Ten Commandments. Mayer Rachmiel, as well as his father, presided over various Jewish cultural organizations in Lemberg, the city where Ludwig was born. The red banner displays the Rose of Sharon, which in the litany is one of the names given to the Blessed Mother, as well as the Stars of the Royal House of David, a symbol of the Jewish people. Ludwig's lifelong motto was from Virgil: tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito." --http://mises.org/about/3248

In many ways the modern (postmodern) financial and familial crises are a product of our postmodern universities, which have substituted "truthiness" for "truth," financial engineering for physical engineering, and innovations in ethics for ideals in innovation. It is almost as if the Greats, by their simple exaltation of Truth and Reason, have been deemed irrelevant in the academy, as simple principles get in the way of financial bubbles, unprecedented student debt, and the privatization of profits and socilzation of risk that is spearheaded by postmodernism's best and brightest--by those who speak forth one thing while holding in their hearts another.

For as I detest the doorways of death, I detest that man, who hides in his heart one thing and speaks forth another. --Achilles, Homer's Iliad

All-too-many contemporary classes are void of any and all Enlightenment Thinkers and the classical giants upon whose shoulders they stood.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be. --Thomas Jefferson

The academy has all but forgotten the importance of character over cash, of the higher ideals over the bottom line, of the soul over semblance. And character, ideals, and the soul are found not in corporate case studies, but in eternity's case studies--the Great Books and Classics. And like Odysseus and Hamlet, the students are longing for their true fathers, as without them, they know their house is in danger.

The students naturally take to the Greats, for there is no higher adventure than sailing forth with the greatest that has been written and spoken, and passage alongside the fellowship of immortal souls is as free as the truth's wind. And as entrepreneurship rewards not risk alone, but risk based on a faith in something greater--in higher ideals and a better way, I'm betting that the Western wind will rise again in a Great Books renaissance, and fill the souls and imaginations of the rising generation, exalting the classics to new heights in living ventures--in novels, films, video games, labs, and institutions--in the Rugged Soul--that wellspring of innovation.

http://artsentrepreneurship.com
http://herosjourneyentrepreneurship.org

And so, with the government growing and family fading, we head for the wild waves and wilderness of entrepreneurial ventures, where one makes things "for himself and by himself"--the requisite foundation of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We sign aboard for a greater adventure, where one gets to own their sweat equity--their very life and dreams--and where, like the knights of King Arthur's Court, each student must find their own path through the forest in an independent project--the forest where Dante also begins--"Midway through the journey of my life, I found myself in a dark wood." And it are those who find their way through that dark wood alone who create all enduring wealth, culture, art, and science:

New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment. --Max Planck

And again we see the primacy of the honest individual in the classic, epic hero's journey!

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. --Joseph Campbell

And the Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek agrees!

"The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason because it misconceives the process on which the growth of reason depends. It may indeed be said that it is the paradox of all collectivist doctrine and its demands for conscious control or conscious planning that they necessarily lead to the demand that the mind of some individual should rule supreme--while only the individualist approach to social phenomena makes us recognize the superindividual forces which guide the growth of reason. Individualism is thus an attitude of humility before this social process and of tolerance to other opinions and is the exact opposite of that intellectual hubris which is at the root of the demand for comprehensive direction of social purpose." --F.A. Hayek, The End of Truth, The Road to Serfdom

And the students all agree--America needs a bold, rugged form of leadership to guide us out of this dark wood. A leader who serves principle above politics, who reaches on back towards the past masters, so as to illuminate the prologue with that eternal light.

Martin Luther King Jr. presents the class's motivation:

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values--that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control. --MLK

Thomas Jefferson agrees, writing in his later years, "They all fall away, one by one, until one is left with Virgil and Homer, and perhaps Homer alone."

We must read the Greats not for tenure and titles, but so as to render their ideals real in living ventures, as the Founding Fathers did in the Constitution and Bogle did in Vanguard. As freedom requires eternal vigilance, and as for evil to triumph all good men must do is nothing, the classical ideals must be perpetually performed in the living context via action--via matching exalted word with exalted deed, as all the enduring poets and prophets agreed.

We again return to Socrates' Apology for a most fundamental lesson in economics and courage, which ought be reunited: "I tell you that virtue is not given by money," Socrates addressed his fellow Athenians who would soon sentence him to death, "but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth . . . acquit me or not, but understand that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times."

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