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Posted September 16, 2002
When I was young, I was by no means committed to private property and free markets. Capitalist ideas did not interest me all that much. Utopian socialist ones did.
So when I walked into a John Birch Society Bookstore, I was prepared to be amused. I found myself somewhat impressed, however, by some of the books. The Liberty Classics editions on the shelves did a pretty good job of elegantly presenting intellectually respectable material. I could not give a leftist smirk at those books.
But one book's title did allow me that smirk: The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality by one Ludwig von Mises.
Why did this title strike me as risible?
It was that definite article, the.
Really, now, could there be only one anti-capitalist mentality? Though I utterly rejected Marx and Stalin and all that Communist crowd, I still suspected that there were a few things wrong with capitalism. But Mises' title suggested that I could conveniently be lumped in with a whole bunch of totalitarian others. My individuality was not important to Ludwig von Mises.
This reaction was not necessarily a rejection of the ideas in Mises' book. But it did provide me an excuse not to read it. Instead, a year or so later, I found myself reading other books by the great Austrian thinker, Planned Chaos and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science just for starters. I had no prejudice against his ideas. But I did detect a prejudice in his title to the little book I would not read. And so I continued to avoid it for years.
With this as background, I offer a bit of advice to individualists: be careful when you criticize collectivists. Don't give them an individualist reason not to consider your ideas!
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