[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 27 (Wednesday, March 5, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H740-H741]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 MISES REDISCOVERED IN UNLIKELY SETTING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas [Mr. Paul] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to proudly announce the recovery 
of a momentous treasure formerly believed to be lost to humankind in 
the noble cause of individual liberty. When German tanks rolled through 
Vienna in 1938, Hitler's national police force made a stop at the 
apartment of one of history's greatest intellectual defenders of 
liberty, an intellectual hero who had recently vacated his apartment to 
escape the fascist tirade of the corporate statists. Upon ransacking 
the vacant apartment, the national police removed 38 boxes of 
intellectual manuscripts containing a detailed analysis of why fascism, 
democratic-socialism, communism, and various other forms of 
collectivism necessarily contains the seeds of its own respective 
destruction.
  It is a pinnacle of irony that for nearly 60 years these treasures, 
believed to have been confiscated and destroyed by a system totally 
devoid of individual liberty and due process, were located in the 
Soviet Union. The genuine irony is that these manuscripts were 
rediscovered only as a consequence of the Soviet experiment's ultimate 
failure, a failure deduced within those same manuscripts as the 
logically necessary outcome of collectivism.
  The great hero of liberty and author of these manuscripts is the 
Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises. I proudly and respectfully request 
entry in the Congressional Record of this compelling story as told by 
Llewellyn Rockwell, President of the institute that currently bears Dr. 
Mises' name.

               [From the Washington Times, Mar. 2, 1997]

                 Mises Rediscovered in Unlikley Setting

                    (By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.)

       The American conservative tradition was once rooted in 
     serious thought and great scholarship--as hard as that may be 
     to believe today. In constitutional law, it stood for strict 
     construction; in philosophy, it stood with the scholastics; 
     and in economics, it stood with the Austrian School and 
     Ludwig von Mises.
       Now comes remarkable news. A massive collection of Mises's 
     personal papers have been recovered in an archive in, of all 
     places, Moscow, where they rested for the duration of the 
     Cold War. They were discovered by two Austrian scholars--a 
     Soveitologist from the University of Graz and a historian 
     from the University of Vienna--and what they've found may 
     change the way we look at modern times.
       Mises came to New York in 1940, one of a generation of 
     Austrian intellectuals forced to flee the Nazi onslaught. He 
     had not come here to retire. This man of 60 would work for 
     more than three decades to revivify the passion for liberty 
     in this country, through passionate teaching and writing for 
     scholarly and popular audiences.
       His central message was contrary to all the fashions of the 
     day. Mises taught that the free market is the key to 
     civilization, and that socialism of all sorts, including the 
     democratic and Keynesian varieties, must be fiercely 
     resisted.
       In those days, immigrants saw acculturation as their first 
     responsibility, so it didn't take long for Americans to think 
     of Mises as their own. In 1949, his great work, Human Action, 
     appeared--a thousand-page treatise that surpasses any 
     previous work in free-market theory. Though German was his 
     first language, Mises wrote his book, still in print, in 
     beautiful English.
       It's easy to forget Mises' extraordinary life before he 
     emigrated here. In 1912, he wrote a book on money and banking 
     that set the European academic world on fire. At the dawn of 
     the central banking age, he claimed money management actually 
     destabilizes the economy by fueling inflation and business 
     cycles.
       In 1919, he forecast a European political explosion. He 
     said it would stem from two sources: the failure of 
     Versailles to settle the nationalities issue, and the rise of 
     statism all over the Continent. In 1923, he tore the

[[Page H741]]

     hide off socialist doctrine with a treatise--still 
     unsurpassed--exposing the social, political and economic 
     consequences of collectivism.
       He followed up in 1927 with a full-blown defense of the 
     classical liberal society, in which the economy is free of 
     government involvement, private property is sacrosanct, the 
     only role of the military is defending the country's borders, 
     and citizens enjoy full freedom of speech and association.
       All the while, he led a famous seminar attended by the best 
     minds in Europe. He taught at the University of Vienna. He 
     was chief economist for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, 
     where he defended capitalism against socialists national and 
     international. He founded and administered a think tank 
     devoted to solving the supposed mystery of the business 
     cycle.
       Yet a few years later, the entire Continent would be 
     darkened by the specter of totalitarianism. Even in America, 
     the 19th-century ideal of free trade and decentralized 
     government was widely seen as outmoded and unworkable. Mises 
     began to see himself as the last of classical liberals.
       More devastating for him was the loss of all his files in 
     Vienna, both personal and academic. He had been keeping them 
     from his early schooling until just before he left to teach 
     in Geneva, a safe harbor for dissident and Jewish 
     intellectuals of the day.
       When German tanks rolled into Vienna in 1938, the police 
     made a stop of Mises' apartment, and looted 38 boxes filled 
     with his precious papers, notes and manuscripts, and carted 
     them away. Until recently, everyone assumed they were 
     destroyed, and with them a good part of Austrian intellectual 
     history.
       Fast forward 53 years, as the Soviet Union unraveled and 
     the veil of secrecy began to rise. Moscow's massive archival 
     holdings were opened for the first time, partly because of a 
     desperate search for something to sell in exchange for hard 
     currency.
       Stefan Karner and Gerhard Jagschitz found in them what they 
     had long sought, and the irony is bracing. The voluminous 
     papers of Mises, the century's leading opponent of statism, 
     reappear only after the world sees that he had been 
     absolutely right. In this man's life is the story of modern 
     times; in his work are the keys to understanding its bloody 
     errors. Now, his papers rediscovered, it's time to rediscover 
     his wisdom.

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