The New Leader Book Paqe
SELIGMAN, BEN B.
The New Leader Book Paqe Lost Economic Horizons By BEN B. SELIGMAN OMNIPOTENT GOVERNMENT-. The Ritt tf (Ae r«U. Stat* and Total War. Bg 1 ,»dwip van Mtttt. Now Havtu: Yal* Vnivtrtitn Pro—. 291...
...They are afflicted with megalomania and want to install dictatorships...
...Those are not Hechtian qualities...
...Hecht has taken Nasi anti-Semitism as a personal affront...
...Instead, he loves himself still in a fanciful Image of the Jewish people as the cosmic Egoist...
...Prices were now determined long hefore commodities reached the consumer...
...But to love one needs humility, piety...
...This dubious theoretical structure is camouflaged by an amazing version of German history...
...Labor connived with the state to increase the cost of production, and that compelled the erection of tariff walls which destroyed free trade...
...That is unfortunate...
...Yet his' own economic philosophy represents the height of intransigence...
...Yet this seemingly powerful argument was refuted Jong ago by such writers as Lange, Taylor, Dickinson and Landauer...
...2.50...
...If the labor unions did not persistently try to raise wages above the potential market rates, there would be no lasting unemployment of many workers...
...But this book is not written about the Jews...
...it Would be interesting to see his chain of logic on this significant question...
...Capitalism was undermined, it is intimated, by labor's demand for higher wages...
...If they refuse to comply with demands of ths consuming public, "they will be thrown out of their positions as capitalists," for "the consumers are the masters...
...and some of the best psssages in ths book ars thoss in which he pours scorn upon other Jews who react to the challenge by denying their Jewishness...
...Ben Seligman contributes reviews to The New Republic snd other msgssines...
...This is no distortion of von Mises' views...
...Then along comes Ben Hecht with a different formula for Jewish apologetic literature and draws virtually the whole of the non-fiction reading audience...
...Von Mises would even deny that economic crises are inherent phases of the life cycle of capitalism...
...The formula is a simple one, well illustrated by the no doubt already famous anecdote of Hecht'a Tante Chaye—a vigorous woman who never apologized except with some kind of a club...
...Who are the anti-Semites, according to Hecht...
...He implies that planners are neurotic...
...The implication, of courss, is clear, that the Buffering of the Jews is the inevitable price of their greatness—and not too great a pries to pay...
...The latter, he insists, offers the sole workable guide to fix ths allocation of resources...
...This is indeed unique history...
...Sem-melweiss and Oliver Wendell Holmes...
...But at this point, Hecht ceases to operate with a flame-thrower, and writes his indictment with a magic lantern...
...The history of German culture, the author assures us, proves that totalitarianism is a complete alien importation...
...This truth applies st an even deeper plane of moral obtuseness to Hecht's own ultimate evaluation of Jewish martyrdom...
...Producers simply mast subject themselves to ths ungra-sieus whims and fancies of those who hoy...
...And, finally, a group of dead literati such as Voltaire and Hilaire Belloc, as well as a professor named Kennedy, who, in Hecbt's description, is a vague, embalmed specimen of a lay figure, unidentifiable with any actually living type of Hecht reader, and might as well be dead...
...1944...
...They got together and established monopolistic practices that effectively abolished market price...
...His only rational argument is based on the disappearance of the free market...
...After blandly making this categorical denial, hs does not pursus it further...
...The point of the story is to show thst ths world has always ignored its inspired Egoists, its prophets...
...People somehow cannot envision the killing of Jews as simple murder...
...Capitalists, too, discovered that the extensive technical apparatus necessitated by modern mass production could not be operated in accordance with free market principles...
...He ascribes to others the faults his own book exhibits...
...Everyone conspired to bring to fruition this vast devilish plot...
...The point Is that none of the potential audience of Hecht's diatribes has any reason to regard his strictures as applying to themselves...
...Chamberlain forgot to add that it usually missea the target...
...There is nothing in the German spirit that accounts for its ready acceptance...
...ss ' Hecht knows that this is not all there is to tell about the Bedevilled...
...If Hecht dramatizes the Jews as the Egoiat people, whom the dull world cannot possibly tolerate, snd who risss superior to every malice of the world, it is because Hecht himself so plainly is, actually, an "egoist," and in the massacre of the Jews in Europe he sees only the challenge to himself...
...It wss written about Ben Hecht—with love, and about his enemies, with something else...
...It is a gloomy thought that this msy be snother reason for the book's populsrity...
...They were bound to revolt against the barbarous requirements of a price economy...
...i^T one point of the book, Hecht throws off a penetrating comment...
...The German people just wanted booty and lebensratini, and therefore vehemently rejected liberal doctrines...
...All the same, the kind of attack this flamboyant book develops against anti-Semitism makes one not entirely happy over its popularity...
...The philanthropists snd psdagoguea of England who advocated public education did not foresee what waves of hatred snd lesentment would rise out of this institution," pontificates Hsrr Professor von Mises...
...This} one is a best seller...
...The Goon, the Loon, the Little Napoleon, the spiritual harelip, the lunatic fringe...
...There is nothing for the Hecht leaders to take to heart in this "Guide to the Bedevilled...
...It is also obvious thst von Mises' theory of wages has nothing in common with recent theoretical developments...
...It can not be stored...
...The market economy waa based on an automatic technique of pricing, and everything, including labor's power to produce, had to hsvs s price...
...Labor, however, is a strange commodity...
...Instead of a direct flaming attack on the moral dullness of the ordinary citizen, which, after all, is the core of anti-Semitic rather than the vicious-ness of the lunatic fringe, Hecht retreats into a cumbersome, light-comedy jM-enario-allegory...
...Description is paraded as political analysis and carelessly con-, cealed invective is displayed as historical logic...
...It is well to lovs one's own, snd surely a healthy mind could find much to love in a people which has survived so much and produced so grestly...
...e * T " SHE author claims for himself a dispassionate and scholarly approsch that 1s nowhere apparent...
...It takes on the distance and pageant-quality of sn historic act...
...It cannot be separated from people...
...John Chamberlain recently characterized von Mises' history as rspid fire...
...Everything von Misis abhors is liberally Plastered with the label "Etatism...
...And by everyone, von Mises means the Junkers, the Wehr-macht, the Nationalists, the Communists, the Catholic-Centrists and the Social Democrats...
...And so, if the callous world allows Jews to be killed wholesale without stirring—well, what can ons expect...
...He bemoans a fate that compels him to listen to such outrageous ideas as economic planning, social control and labor's rights...
...The Jews in Hecht's allegory are the world's prophetic, Egoist people, just as ths Germans are its murderers...
...That is a healthy attitude for a Jew...
...v There are three or four national Jewish organisations who, after the appearance of this book, can now save themselves considerable expense by firing their highly paid public relations staffs...
...The reader is not disappointed...
...It was this palpable lark of balance that contributed ultimately to ths decline of the free market...
...Unemployment as a mass phenomenon ia always due to the enforcement of minimum wages higher than the potential wages which the unhampered labor market would have fixed...
...In keeping with the general tone of his discourse, von Mises presents an excited oration on the sins of the planned economy...
...A reasoned historical appraisal of the market economy should reveal that it brought about its own doom...
...For him, Jew-killing becomes sn episode in Hechtian day-dreams in which an inflated Hechtian ego-image plays a role of cosmic proportions...
...After the first ten pages, one nstu-rally expects s broadside attack on economic planning...
...They have produced mountains of apologetic literature, full of authenticated facts snd sound reasoning—which nobody reads...
...Ordinarily, books on anti-Semitism are a drug on the market...
...Hecht undertook to writs this book ip the name of s double mission: "to write of the Jewish with leva and of their enemies with something else...
...Von Mista' portrayal of the world of 4sfnwJ faire la an awkward amalgam of faith, hope and historical distortion...
...Ludwig von Mises, who is often accompanied in his strange lamentations by tuch writers as Friedrich von Hayek, Lionel Robbing and Gustave Stolper, frantically berates the modern world for refusing to abide by the economic verities of the 18th century...
...291 pagtt...
...He prefers the somewhat dated wage-fund notion which asssrts that labor as a class suffers when anyone obtains an increase in wages...
...Those who feel thst laissez fsire has no meaning for modern man are accused of being doctrinaires and intransigent dogmstists...
...It wss "Etatism," he discovers, that upset the delicate balance of the capitalist economy and culminated in the terrible agony of Naxidom...
...They simply had to be assured s minimum price that would guarantee the recovery of sunk costs...
...13,75 ACURIOUS intellectual exhibition ia Wie spectacle of a man declaiming the economic virtues of a culture that has ceased to exist...
...Who are the anti-Semites...
...To describe the •vils of state intervention, he invents an «gly word "Ktatism," which is skillfully employed to arouse horror snd fear...
...Von Mises quite neatly summarises his theory of life when he says: The market is a democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote and where voting is repeated every day...
...Let not the reader think the author to be s reactionary...
...On the contrary, he ia a liberal and a progressive, but his liberalism is more appropriate to the 18th century...
...He clearly asserts the political conflicts of Europe to be attributable to public education...
...Yet all this is a foul myth to von Mises...
...Not the good people who read Hecht, but those other guys—the Goons, Loons, etc...
...Tet laisses fairs theory, carried to its logical and cruel conclusion, would insist thst labor be dealt with as the merchant deals with corn...
...Economic nationalism, Marxism, tariffs, Price control and rationing in wartime, the New Deal, autarchy—even public education—are the diabolic offsprings jef that devil of the modern world, "Etatism...
...But the author blithely continues in the even tenor of the past...
...Then, also, the German people who, as a whole, and not counting individuals who really should not be considered German, are congenital murderers...
...Capitalism, glibly identified with liberalism and democracy, arose, he says, from a moral atmosphere that encouraged saving, did not discriminate against anyone and assursd peace and Prosperity for all...
...The New Leader Book Paqe Lost Economic Horizons By BEN B. SELIGMAN OMNIPOTENT GOVERNMENT...
...In the world of laisses fairs, says ths author, those who were penniless had a free head to develop new industries, provided they had ths ingenuity to do nek la this creation of pare imagination the consumer is king...
...Ths world always detests its gsniuses, the inspired Egoists...
...Hecht's true reaction to anti-Semitism hss not been to learn to love the real Jewish people, for be still is blocked from understanding anything at all about them...
...What von Mises ignores is the obvious fact thst some voters have more pennies then others...
...A Jew in Anger By BEN HALPERN A QUI DM TO THE BEDEVILLED, t? Ban Htcht...
...But, of course, Professor von Mises may be unfamiliar with the Civil Liberties Committee's investigation of some years ago...
...Hers facts, tendencies, parlies and men are mixed in a fantastic potpourri of misinterpretation...
...His profsssed change of heart with respect to Jews, from indifference to love, would also be ' a healthy reaction, if it were true...
...He understands thst if millions of Jews were slaughtered, the good, decent, ordinsry citizens who stood by and did not prevent it are somehow implicated in the crime...
...This theory, it will be recalled, was finally rejected by its leading 19th century proponent, John Stuart Mill, but Ludwig von Mises sees fit to revive it in this book...
...concerning Dra...
...TllE book really strikes bottom with the author's dissertation on what's wrong with labor...
...I Ben Hslpern is the managing editor of The Jewish F roe tier...
...Labor unions, furthermore, employ coercion and intimidation and they are supported in their base practices by public opinion which has ". . . approved strikes, stigmatized strikebreakers as treacherous scoundrels, approved the punishment inflicted by organized labor on reluctant employers and on strikebreakers, and reacted strongly when the authorities tried to interfere to protect the assaulted...
...In this wsy he hoped to discharge the personal onus which the challenge of Nasi anti-Semitism imposed upon Bon Hecht One of the secrets of this book's popularity is ths esger defiance with which Hecht took up the challenge...
...Ntw York: Chariot Seribntr't Seas...
...People were bound to protest against a system of economics that converted them into inanimate adjuncts of the loom and the steam engine...
...Jew-killing is not even an historic spectacle for Hecht, for he has an abysmal ignorance of Jewish history and utter indifference to real, living Jews, which he does not even bother to veil...
...Hecht'a msnusl of tactics for anti-anti-Semitic propaganda prescribes the proverbial "Attack is the best >feiise...
Vol. 27 • July 1944 • No. 31
