It’s all ‘Planned Chaos’

“Ignorance of history is our true enemy.”

That was the closing statement last week in a letter to the editor from Bob Gault, a Longboat Key resident, former CEO of Universal Studios and Sea World and diehard Constitutional patriot.

He nailed it.

Ignorance of history is indeed one of the more destructive enemies of our time. And it runs far and wide among Americans. Perhaps worse, it evidently runs deep within the highest ranks of American government, including the occupants of all wings of the White House.

We all know, of course, our president, Joe Biden, is senile. Even so, he should not get a pass for his historical ignorance; he is, after all, president of the United States. Nor, especially, should his behind-the-scenes Wizards of Doom be excused. Their apparent ignorance of history — or their willingness to ignore it and the truth — is ruining the United States.

Their out-of-touch arrogance blinds them to what has been so obvious: Practically every policy measure they have forced and inflicted upon Americans has proven what the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1951 in his analysis of the Socialist movements in Europe from the early 1900s, through and after World War II.

The editors at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama summed up perfectly von Mises’ 1951 book, “Socialism: An Economic & Sociological Analysis,” when in 2009 they published 83 pages of excerpts from von Mises’ book. They aptly entitled the booklet: “Planned Chaos.”

It is a marvelous play on words.

As von Mises revealed with historical fact and astute analysis 70 years ago, all the central planning that European Socialists, Fascists, Communists and Nazis imposed and dictated on the masses in Eastern Europe and Western Europe resulted in economic and social chaos — chaos that made their countrymen suffer and poor.

Practically everything they did made conditions worse and chaotic.

Fast forward to the U.S. today. Take a look at the accompanying box. It is a list of the chaos that has followed as a result of the policies and mandates that Biden and his behind-the-scenes masters have inflicted on Americans. Sadly, this list will continue to grow. The end of the chaos is nowhere in sight.

But our Washington elites are oblivious. When Joe Biden spoke to Americans on Sept. 1 in Philadelphia, for example, he said the “work of my presidency” is to “build an America that is more prosperous, free and just” — “a mission I believe in with my whole soul.”

But either Biden knew that was a brazen lie to try to fool Americans. Or he is oblivious to reality. Or a combination of both.

Think back over the past 19 months. If you reflect and examine what has transpired in every facet of American life and in the U.S. economy, the evidence shows that practically everything Biden, his wizards and the Democratic Party Congress have done has had the opposite effect of that mission.

Americans are less prosperous — and growing poorer. Americans are far less free. When the federal government continues to print money and spend and borrow at the rate it has under Biden, the resulting inflation and national debt are insidious taxes that sap Americans’ standard of living. And finally, everyone knows without a doubt, the United States, with its multitiered system of justice, is far less just than it was. Americans no longer believe there is equal justice under the law. The cause of this misery, von Mises wrote, begins with interventionism — when the government interferes with the market to effect the political elites’ quest for their imagined utopia.

“The authority seeks to influence the market by the intervention of its coercive power, but it does not want to eliminate the market altogether. It desires that production and consumption should develop along lines different from those prescribed by the unhindered market, and it wants to achieve its aim by injecting into the working of the market orders, commands and prohibitions for whose enforcement the police power and its apparatus of coercion and compulsion stand ready.”

“(But) all the methods of interventionism are doomed to failure,” von Mises wrote. To wit, wrote von Mises:

“Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other.

“If government spending is financed by borrowing from the commercial banks, it means credit expansion and inflation. If in the course of such inflation the rise in commodity prices exceeds the rise in nominal wage rates, unemployment will drop. But what makes unemployment shrink is precisely the fact that real wage rates are falling.”

Sound familiar?

“No economist,” von Mises stated unequivocally, “ever dared to assert that interventionism could result in anything other than in disaster and chaos.” And he wrote that after studying the disasters and chaos that led to wars and destruction in Europe over a half century.

But here in the U.S., the political elites, academia and media have no clue of history or pay no attention to it. They keep spreading the coerciveness of government — shut down fossil fuel energy; force unaffordable EVs; take over the delivery of health services; socialize all education; forgive college loans; militarize the IRS; regulate business to the point of strangulation.

Nowhere in this chaos has any of them articulated what the end game of all this will look like. What will success look like?

There will be no success. von Mises:

“What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at. On the contrary they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter.”

As we all know, it’s a law of politics: When the first round of intervention fails or produces more unintended consequences, the politicians add more regulations and restrictions.

“Proceeding step by step on this way,” von Mises concluded, “it finally reaches a point in which all economic freedom of individuals has disappeared. Then socialism emerges.”

How do we end this chaos? “What is needed,” Mises concluded, “is common sense and moral courage.”

It will take more than that — a complete purge of the perpetrators, starting Nov. 15.