The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. MclNNiS). Under the Speaker’s announced policy of January 7, 1997, and under a previous order of the House, the following Members will be recognized for 5 minutes each.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Texas [Mr. PAUL] is recognized for 5 minutes.
1997 Ron Paul 7:1
Mr. PAUL.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to proudly announce the recovery of a momentous treasure formerly believed to be lost to humankind in the noble cause of individual liberty. When German tanks rolled through Vienna in 1938, Hitler’s national police force made a stop at the apartment of one of history’s greatest intellectual defenders of liberty, an intellectual hero who had recently vacated his apartment to escape the fascist tirade of the corporate statists. Upon ransacking the vacant apartment, the national police removed 38 boxes of intellectual manuscripts containing a detailed analysis of why fascism, democratic-socialism, communism, and various other forms of collectivism necessarily contains the seeds of its own respective destruction.
1997 Ron Paul 7:2
It is a pinnacle of irony that for nearly 60 years these treasures, believed to have been confiscated and destroyed by a system totally devoid of individual liberty and due process, were located in the Soviet Union. The genuine irony is that these manuscripts were rediscovered only as a consequence of the Soviet experiment’s ultimate failure, a failure deduced within those same manuscripts as the logically necessary outcome of collectivism.
1997 Ron Paul 7:3
The great hero of liberty and author of these manuscripts is the Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises. I proudly and respectfully request entry in the Congressional Record of this compelling story as told by Llewellyn Rockwell, President of the institute that currently bears Dr. Mises’ name.
1997 Ron Paul 7:4
[From the Washington Times, Mar. 2, 1997]
Mises Rediscovered in Unlikley Setting (By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.)
The American conservative tradition was once rooted in serious thought and great scholarship—as hard as that may be to believe today. In constitutional law, it stood for strict construction; in philosophy, it stood with the scholastics; and in economics, it stood with the Austrian School and Ludwig von Mises.
1997 Ron Paul 7:5
Now comes remarkable news. A massive collection of Mises’s personal papers have been recovered in an archive in, of all places, Moscow, where they rested for the duration of the Cold War. They were discovered by two Austrian scholars—a Soveitologist from the University of Graz and a historian from the University of Vienna—and what they’ve found may change the way we look at modern times.
1997 Ron Paul 7:6
Mises came to New York in 1940, one of a generation of Austrian intellectuals forced to flee the Nazi onslaught. He had not come here to retire. This man of 60 would work for more than three decades to revivify the passion for liberty in this country, through passionate teaching and writing for scholarly and popular audiences.
1997 Ron Paul 7:7
His central message was contrary to all the fashions of the day. Mises taught that the free market is the key to civilization, and that socialism of all sorts, including the democratic and Keynesian varieties, must be fiercely resisted.
1997 Ron Paul 7:8
In those days, immigrants saw acculturation as their first responsibility, so it didn’t take long for Americans to think of Mises as their own. In 1949, his great work. Human Action, appeared—a thousand-page treatise that surpasses any previous work in free-market theory. Though German was his first language, Mises wrote his book, still in print, in beautiful English.
1997 Ron Paul 7:9
It’s easy to forget Mises’ extraordinary life before he emigrated here. In 1912, he wrote a book on money and banking that set the European academic world on fire. At the dawn of the central banking age, he claimed money management actually destabilizes the economy by fueling inflation and business cycles.
1997 Ron Paul 7:10
In 1919, he forecast a European political explosion. He said it would stem from two sources: the failure of Versailles to settle the nationalities issue, and the rise of statism all over the Continent. In 1923, he tore the
hide off socialist doctrine with a treatise— still unsurpassed—exposing the social, political and economic consequences of collectivism.
1997 Ron Paul 7:11
He followed up in 1927 with a full-blown defense of the classical liberal society, in which the economy is free of government involvement, private property is sacrosanct, the only role of the military is defending the country’s borders, and citizens enjoy full freedom of speech and association.
1997 Ron Paul 7:12
All the while, he led a famous seminar attended by the best minds in Europe. He taught at the University of Vienna. He was chief economist for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, where he defended capitalism against socialists national and international. He founded and administered a think tank devoted to solving the supposed mystery of the business cycle.
1997 Ron Paul 7:13
Yet a few years later, the entire Continent would be darkened by the specter of totalitarianism. Even in America, the 19th-century ideal of free trade and decentralized government was widely seen as outmoded and unworkable. Mises began to see himself as the last of classical liberals.
1997 Ron Paul 7:14
More devastating for him was the loss of all his files in Vienna, both personal and academic. He had been keeping them from his early schooling until just before he left to teach in Geneva, a safe harbor for dissident and Jewish intellectuals of the day.
1997 Ron Paul 7:15
When German tanks rolled into Vienna in 1938, the police made a stop of Mises’ apartment, and looted 38 boxes filled with his precious papers, notes and manuscripts, and carted them away. Until recently, everyone assumed they were destroyed, and with them a good part of Austrian intellectual history.
1997 Ron Paul 7:16
Fast forward 53 years, as the Soviet Union unraveled and the veil of secrecy began to rise. Moscow’s massive archival holdings were opened for the first time, partly because of a desperate search for something to sell in exchange for hard currency.
1997 Ron Paul 7:17
Stefan Kamer and Gerhard Jagschitz found in them what they had long sought, and the irony is bracing. The voluminous papers of Mises, the century’s leading opponent of statism, reappear only after the world sees that he had been absolutely right. In this man’s life is the story of modem times; in his work are the keys to understanding its bloody errors. Now, his papers rediscovered, it’s time to rediscover his wisdom.
Notes:
1997 Ron Paul Chapter 7 -->
No C-Span video was found for this speech.video
1997 Ron Paul 7:5 Soveitologist probably should be Sovietologist.
