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How the Soviets Created an Austrian School Economist

Yuri Maltsev, R.I.P.

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January 28, 2023

My old friend Yuri Maltsev passed away on Thursday.  As many LRC and Mises.org readers know, Yuri was part of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika staff until he defected from the Soviet Union in 1989 and came to America.  He earned a Ph.D. at Moscow State University during the Cold War and, lo and behold, became an Austrian School economist!  I met Yuri soon after he arrived in the U.S. and asked him how he became familiar with the Austrian School.  His answer was that part of his job for Gorbachev was to read and criticize the literature of the bourgeois capitalist exploiters.  As such, he was given special permission to access that literature, some of which came with a long prison sentence to any ordinary Soviet citizen caught with it.

Yuri said that he read a contraband copy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in mimeograph form, and passed it on to someone else immediately after he finished it.  Everything in the book was absolutely true about collectivism and government planning, he said.  Years later, in 2009, right after the crash of 2008, Yuri and our friend Tom Woods appeared on the Glenn Beck television program to discuss The Road to Serfdom.  After that discussion, the sales ranking of this 1943 book went to #1 on Amazon.  I then put together a five-week online course on the book for the Mises Institute that attracted several hundred students from all over the world.

Having spent so much of his life in socialist hell, once he got a good-paying job in America Yuri reveled in consumerism.  He would buy a $3,000 car, drive it for a while, then sell it back to the dealer he bought it from.  He said he did that about thirty times.  He also bought foreclosed real estate from HUD and rented or resold them, typically offering say, $5,000 for a house listed at say, $35-50,000 – and succeeding!

Yuri was associated with the Mises Institute for many years as a guest speaker at conferences and a lecturer at the annual Mises University.  What an amazing time it was for me in the early days of Mises University to sit around at a place like Stanford University shortly after the worldwide collapse of socialism talking with such people as Murray Rothbard and Yuri Maltsev.  He was always an extraordinarily popular speaker because of his wit and his unique knowledge of both Austrian economics and real-world experiences of having lived much of his life in the former Soviet Union.  No one in the world was better able to explain in such vivid detail why Mises was right about socialism all along.  If anything, Mises may have understated the barbarity of socialism which, in the Soviet case, was “all about mass murder,” as Yuri said.

When I first met Yuri I asked him what he thought the biggest difference was between life in the Soviet Union and life in America.  He said that in the Soviet Union no one believed anything the government said, but Americans believe everything the government says.  The response of at least 90 percent of Americans to covid totalitarianism is the most recent example of this truism.

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From LRC, here.

Segula: Saying Parshas Haman With Targum – EVERY DAY (On the Mistake’s Origin)

The Big Mistake

Friday, January 14, 2022

THE ג’ בשלח MISTAKE
The popular Minhag of פרשת המן on ג’ בשלח was unheard of just one generation ago. Not even  Riminover Chasidim of the past ever heard of it.
In all of the כתבים of R. Mendel Riminover Zt”l there is no mention of the ג’ בשלח סגולה
The first מקור (source) of this Minhag is in the ספר ילקוט מנחם חדש published in 1991. The Sefer writes that Rav S.W. Weinberger Zt”l heard from the Stropkover Rebbe Zt”l in the name of R.M.Riminov Zt”l  about the ג’ בשלח פרשת המן סגולה
After the publication of the Sefer, this Segulah spread like wildfire. All the weekly Torah pamphlets & every frum internet site and App. reminded us not to forget to say פרשת המן on Tuesday בשלח.
*At a later date  Rav Weinberger’s כתבים were found in which he writes that  he heard from  the Stropkover Rebbe how R,M, Riminover said פרשת המן, שנים מקרא ואחד תרגום EVERY DAY & had in mind that פרנסה is מן השמים. R.M.R. claimed that by having this כוונה while reciting the Parsha you are assured not to ever lack in פרנסה (As mentioned by the קדמונים)
Rav Weinberg wrote that it was on ג’ בשלח when he met the Stropkover Rebbe. The confusion came about from this one line that he heard about this סגולה on ג’ בשלח from the Stropkover Rebbe R.M.M. never said that there is a special day of ג’ בשלח to say the פרשת המן

Looking for Human Truths? Ask Old People and Check Old Books!

You may have read the important Rashba responsum regarding “בכל דבר שיש קבלה ביד הזקנים והזקנות מעמנו”.

Quoting the introduction to “Democracy: The God That Failed” by Dr. Hans Hoppe, p. 23:

Regardless of the unorthodox interpretations and conclusions reached in the following studies, the theories and theorems used to do so are definitely not new or unorthodox. Indeed, if one assumes, as I do, that a priori social theory and theorems exist, then one should also expect that most of such knowledge is old and that theoretical progress is painstakingly slow. This indeed appears to be the case.

To illustrate his economics’ hoariness Dr. Hoppe then weakly points to the… 16th-century Scholastics (with a hand-waving flourish of Rothbard’s history of economics), when he could have pointed to Mishlei and Chazal (had he known or cared.)

Hoppe also wants to justify and, indeed, glorify “grand social theory”, see the rest of the valuable intro.

Semi-libertarian Nassim Taleb often echoes the same sentiment.

Here, quoting “Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life” p. 176-177:

If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works 90 percent of the time. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are that it works at less than 10 percent, unless it is has also been covered by the grandmother and the classics, in which case why would you need a psychologist? [footnote] Consider that a recent effort to replicate the hundred psychology papers in “prestigious” journals of 2008 found that, out of a hundred, only thirty-nine replicated. Of these thirty-nine, I believe that fewer than ten are actually robust and transfer outside the narrowness of the experiment. Similar defects have been found in medicine and neuroscience; more on those later. (I will discuss the point further in Chapters 18 and (mostly) 19, as well as why the warnings of your grandmother or interdicts aren’t “irrational”; most of what is called “irrational” comes from misunderstanding of probability.)

(I recommend his argument there too, by the way.)

It is critical that it is not just that the books of the ancients are still around and have been filtered by Lindy, but that those populations who read them have survived as well.

While our knowledge of physics was not available to the ancients, human nature was. So everything that holds in social science and psychology has to be Lindy-proof, that is, have an antecedent in the classics; otherwise it will not replicate or not generalize beyond the experiment. By classics we can define the Latin (and late Hellenistic) moral literature (moral sciences meant something else than they do today): Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Lucian, or the poets: Juvenal, Horace, or the later French so-called “moralists” (La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, La Bruyère, Chamfort). Bossuet is a class on his own. One can use Montaigne and Erasmus as a portal to the ancients: Montaigne was the popularizer of his day; Erasmus was the thorough compiler.

Don’t second-hander goyim just love quoting other second-hander goyim? And speaking of evolution, haven’t Jews survived even longer?

We have written the Lindy effect is found in Chazal here.

Of course “Chareidism” is partly about denying the historical past and the past’s inconvenient insights (not to mention negating its relevance)…

People Stealing Your Ideas? If Your Ideas Are Any Good, You’ll Have To Ram Them Down People’s Throats!

What was popular among our readers recently:

Enjoy!

Marriage Counseling Is for Goyim!

I know a few married couples that break all the rules (of any accepted school of thought) and have great Shalom Bayis (yes, I do know).

How is this possible? Simple.

The couple doesn’t come to the marriage with much spiritual “baggage”. Either that or they do full Teshuvah for prior sins.

Fine, this comes across as reactionary. Sue me (and also name as respondents the Arizal, Netziv, Chida).