The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, by Ludwig von Mises

The substitution of laissez-faire capitalism for the precapitalistic methods of economic management has multiplied population figures and raised in an unprecedented way the average standard of living. A nation is the more prosperous today the less it has tried to put obstacles in the way of the spirit of free enterprise and private initiative. The people of the United States are more prosperous than the inhabitants of all other countries because their government embarked later than the governments in other parts of the world upon the policy of obstructing business. Nonetheless many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society’s economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the “Industrial Revolution.” Now under capitalism the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books and silly moving pictures. The “ideological superstructure” of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show and the art of strip-tease, the Hollywood pictures and the detective stories.

The bias and bigotry of public opinion manifests itself most clearly in the fact that it attaches the epithet “capitalistic” exclusively to things abominable, never to those of which everybody approves. How can any good come from capitalism! What is valuable has been produced in spite of capitalism, but the bad things are excrescences of capitalism.

It is the task of this essay to analyze this anti-capitalistic bias and to disclose its roots and its consequences.