My Fourth of July with Per Bylund
Long gone are the previous American Independence days when I naively participated in all of the practices that bespoke of true American patriotism. Sure, barbeques are still good. Fireworks, ok. Seeing Old Glory everywhere–fine. Parades are still horrible. But, all of the attendant feelings I was supposed to experience and honestly wanted to believe, have gone way, way, by the wayside. Thank the Almighty for that. I decided to spend the Fourth with some great company.
I do not feign to–as I did when I lived in Pilsen (Chicago) years ago during one early July–maintain that all of the over-the-top neighborhood fireworks shows amounted to an implicit expression of true love of America. No, the day is just an excuse to blow shit up. What my then conservative-leaning mind moved me to imagine was that, although it was not stated or expressed in an overt–or for that matter, any kind of manner–me and my fellow Americans, well, we shared something. A deep, perhaps latent, but certainly present seed of hope for the American experiment bound us together as we all marveled at the intensity and sound of a quarter-stick of dynamite exploding. How those two things were connected in my mind, who knows? The conservative mind, pace Russell Kirk, spends much of its energy working out the myriad contradictions and self-binding limitations that come with the Overton window of its territory. This Fourth of July, I did not read the aforementioned Kirk, or Buckley, or even Buchanan (Pat, not James)–although it must be admitted that Buchanan’s prose, wit and insight as a paleo-conservative outshines anything the others have contributed. Instead, I sat with Per Bylund’s book How to Think About the Economy: A Primer and got a nasty sunburn doing so.
This book took me back. Back, that is, to what I might term my awakening as a libertarian, then anarcho-capitalist. By my late twenties, I had never heard of men like Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises, much less Frederic Bastiat, Gustave de Molinari, the Salamanca school, or Carl Menger. Faint mentions of Emma Goldman–always to be associated with militant communism and bomb-throwing–maintained a thin mental file. I had heard that Frederick Hayek had written something other than The Road to Serfdom, but his Nobel Prize in economics was attributable more so to being the Austrian representation of Milton Friedman than anything novel or special. I knew just enough history and economics to declare that socialism sucked, communism was murderous and that capitalism was good. I could not provide elaborate nor persuasive nor philosophical defenses for any of those positions outside of the consequentialist arguments of: “Have you seen North Korea vs. South Korea?”, or “Stalin’s collectivism led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.”
Two factors led to my conversion; an additional one cemented me as an ancap for life. Around 2010, I determined that Ron Paul was right, and the proof of his message came both in what Julian Assange had revealed about the war-industrial complex and the reaction to those revelations by all of the establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike. Washington had engaged in campaigns of mass and wanton destruction and killing of people throughout the Islamic world that was the natural conclusion of Deep State actions, decades-old, meant to keep the Middle East, in particular, under the vassalage of the United States. That the heroic Assange and Manning were immediately vilified by everyone from Newt Gingrich to Hillary Clinton assured the veracity of the charges that Washington D.C. and the neo-conservatives running the cabal, were nothing but war criminals who had rendered the notion of representative government and national self-interest, risible. Soon thereafter, I heard the great Tom Woods, an author with whose works I was already well-familiar since I used them exhaustively in my classes, openly and relentlessly assault the supposed conservatives in the country. What had the Bush Administration and the Mitt Romneys of the world really “conserved”? Woods made it apparent to me that what they had conserved was the American empire and in doing so, most lived radically unprincipled lives ready to bend low at the faintest whiff of acceptance from progressive outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and all of academia.
Such revelations hit me like a thunderbolt and with a kind of appetite and curiosity that I had not experienced since my early days in religious formation, I consumed the very works of the very authors to whom Woods constantly alluded; the men who had been censored from my supposedly elite and well-rounded formal education. Rothbard, Mises, Murphy, Rockwell, Salerno, Hoppe; Anatomy of the State, Human Action, Choice: Cooperation, Against the Left, Money: Sound and Unsound, Democracy: The God that Failed.
All of this would have ended just as quickly as it began if by some way or some how, any element of these theories contradicted Catholicism. Did Cantillon’s anti-mercantilism or Menger’s subjective valuation theory run up against Saint Paul in Ephesians or the Council of Trent?
The answer: NOT AT ALL. In fact, it was in reading Tom Woods’s great treatise The Church and the Market that I realized and reveled in the beautiful, natural synergy and complementarity of free markets and true human freedom found in revelation. In other words, the divine, emergent order described by the best minds of the Church by necessity coincided with the exercise of human freedom and respect for property rightly-gained. Prosperity and progress comes, as it ought, not through theft, plunder, and central planning, but through liberty, cooperation, and the flourishing of proper talents and abilities. I saw, as Murray Rothbard often called it, “the miracle” of the free market. It is best to sit with and appreciate a miracle when you see it happen, and happening.
All of these autobiographical notes are meant to say that Per Bylund’s book is an excellent explanation of the fundamentals of economics; a direct and intentionally concise summation of how to understand humans acting in the world. I especially prize the way he expounds upon how much we should appreciate concepts such as scarcity-moving-to-abundance, the fundamental role of the entrepreneur in not just bearing risk but determining prices himself, and the inherent idiocy of socializing risk. For example, when defining uncertainty bearing (a concept with which I have wrestled and have since formed some important conclusions), Bylund writes:
The major problem entrepreneurs face is that the value of production effort is not known until it is completed. It is only when the finished good is sold that the entrepreneur learns if the investment was worthwhile–if consumers want the good. In contrast, costs are known and incurred long before the good is completed and offered for sale. Note that these costs are not merely the inputs that make the output, such as the flour, yeast, and water that are turned into bread, but also the capital needed: the oven, the bakery, etc. Even in those cases when an entrepreneur takes orders and is paid before producing the actual good, some costs are incurred as part of the not-yet-produced good. Those costs include such things as setting up the business, experimenting with capital, figuring out how to make an oven, developing a recipe or blueprint for production. Investments must be made to produce the good, which can then be sold.” (61)
Extend from that concept then. So long as labor understands and comes to a reasonable appreciation of how capital (especially represented by the entrepreneur) assumes all of that uncertainty and risk, workers then can understand and appreciate why a bank, the industrialist, the mine owner, the logistics manager, and yes–even the hedge fund head–are not exploiting their own production but facilitating its optimal output. However, when government comes in to bail out said banks and enterprises and the entrepreneur becomes apparatchik, laborers rightly respond with intense indignation at the injustice. The benefits of socialization of risk indeed never do trickle-down. What a tremendous moral hazard erupts into misdirected enmity of the free market!
Bylund elucidates much more than uncertainty bearing and socialization of risk in this fine primer which accomplishes both its stated and implicit goals of introducing ecomomic concepts to the newbie and sparking a desire in the reader to read on, especially of the Austrian school greats.
It makes me wonder as to what came first for me: Was I a libertarian before becoming an Austrian, or vice-versa?
In the end, I guess it doesn’t matter at all. The best satisfaction for me is knowing the reward in that both ideologies clarified my world and elevated my thinking to such a degree that I was able to teach them and edify my students with them for years afterward. I shared and explained these fundamental and revelatory truths to them using my own methods as well as the ideas of the greats themselves. I even included businessmen, entrepreneurs, producers as well as workers in my open intentions during school prayer. How scandalous indeed. For all that and for my avid defense of actual Catholicism, in the end, I no longer teach at those schools.
The career-burn and the sun burn are worth it.
