By Jonathan Newman
Austrian economics and the Mises Institute have come up in Tucker Carlson's interviews with three different guests over the past few months, and instead of being critical or dismissive, Carlson was open to the ideas.
Carlson to Ron Paul:
I’d never seen you speak before and you went off about the Federal Reserve and I remember thinking “what a weird, what an esoteric subject!” I knew nothing about it. I thought only crazy people cared but again I was completely ignorant about monetary policy at the time and I was shocked by how much the crowd loved it.
Dave Smith
It’s kind of the same thing that happened to Libertarians. I think they’re in Washington D.C. and that’s not where you’re supposed to be. The best libertarian organization in the world is the Mises Institute and it’s based in Auburn. They specifically put it there because they want no part of Washington D.C. And then you see the Cato [Institute] and guys like that who are based out of D.C. They get very corrupted. […] They’re having cocktail parties with the Fed Chairman.
Erik Prince
When you look at history, the lie of socialism, communism, it’s easy for elitists to love that paradigm. Because the right-wing, Austrian school economics approach is massive decentralization, decision-making at the micro-level. A farmer knows what prices are, has a good idea what demand is going to be, decides whether he is going to plant more acres that year or not, and takes that risk himself. The Soviet planner says, “I need everyone to plant this many acres, and we’re going to do it at this price.” It’s the lie of individual incentive versus massive central planning to the betterment of elite thinking, with the grift that goes with it. And that’s just a mind-worm disease that so many people generation after generation continue to fall for.