Quinn Slobodian: Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans: Race, Migration and the Limits of Ludwig von Mises’s Globalism: "The Habsburg Empire... was a silent and open partner in the writings of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises on international order, especially on questions of migration and the management of a polyglot population. After 1918 Mises conceived of robust forms of multinational governance capable of protecting a world of what he called ‘perfect capitalism’ with total global mobility of labour, capital and commodities. Yet, by 1945 he had scaled back his proposals to the effective recreation of the Habsburg Empire.... Mises’s international theory was cleft by a faultline between a normative theory of an open borders world and the empirical reality of a closed borders world, underwritten by what he saw as the stubborn obstacles of human ignorance and racial animus. "How can we expect that the Hindus, the worshipers of the cow, should grasp the theories of Ricardo and of Bentham?" —Ludwig von Mises, 1944...
...Ludwig von Mises, the mentor to Hayek, Gottfried Haberler and Fritz Machlup.... As with his protégé Hayek, Mises came to see a model of ‘double government’ inspired by the Habsburg example delinking cultural and economic administration as paradigmatic for managing the uneasy settlement between mass democracy and capitalism.... In contrast to Hayek, who came to see ignorance as an asset for the functioning of the market order, Mises concluded that perfect capitalism could not be built by imperfect humans.12 Unable to transcend the horizon of his own origins, Mises scaled back his proposals for supranational order to a plan for the effective recreation of the Habsburg Empire. Mises’s globalism–and its limits–offers a case of the challenges faced by economic liberals in the twentieth century as they sought to bring their dreams of global capitalism down to earth.
Far from mere antiquarian concern, Mises’s early musings are at the heart of a dispute in the late 2010s between feuding proponents of the radical free market in Germany and the United States. Since the arrival of over one million asylum seekers to Germany since 2015 and the ongoing political agitation against undocumented migrants in the United States, self-described libertarians have split over whether open or closed borders for people best capture the free market ideal.... Right-wing libertarians have claimed support in his writings for their cause, including one leading ‘Austrian’ economist, who cited Mises on national self-determination alongside Malcolm X in support of the goal of culturally homogeneous secession in 2017. Other libertarians have insisted, by contrast, on the seamless adherence of Mises to open borders for humans as well as capital and goods.... The network of institutes named for Mises and Hayek in the Unites States and Europe have become platforms for exclusionary strains of libertarianism opposing free migration.
A final appraisal of Mises’s stance on borders remains elusive. This article shows that the interpretation of his views depends on whether one follows Mises’s norm of perfect capitalism or his diagnosis of imperfect humanity. What is beyond question is that the coeval development of ever greater mobility for goods and capital and ever tighter regulation for migrants has been one of the defining features of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries...
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