Scott Horton Interviews Charles Goyette
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Charles Goyette, former Antiwar Radio co-contributor and author of The Dollar Meltdown : Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments, discusses his article, “Too Late! The Government Already Did Do Something” at lewrockwell.com; how government-imposed wage and price controls lead to shortages and eventually black markets; the producer pricing pressures that are overlooked when limits are set on the price of finished consumer goods; and Ludwig von Mises’s reminder to keep the monetary system out of government hands.
MP3 here. (20:30)
Charles Goyette was a longtime award winning morning drive-time radio host from Phoenix, AZ. He is a libertarian commentator, who is noted for his outspoken anti-war views, his opposition to the war in Iraq, and his economic commentary. He is the author of the book The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Impending Currency Crisis with Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments.
Dave Boyer
February 27th, 2011 at 3:12 am
this guy has no class analysis, and is thus without any class.(Except, by default, the ruling class)
cowbot
February 27th, 2011 at 5:45 am
Of course he has class analysis. The only one that matters, which is the people with the political power and the printing press – versus the people who have to earn their money by voluntary transactions.
That’s the only ‘class analysis’ that has any meaning. The tax-eaters vs the tax-payers.
One small quibble with Goyette is the claim that federal reserve inflation drives up prices in non-dollar companies. He has not shown how a devaluation of the US dollar results in a devaluation of the Egyptian Dinar.
Scott of course picked this up right away. Sharp man.
DONATE SOME MONEY TO ANTIWAR.COM
Hacklheber
February 27th, 2011 at 9:16 am
http://mises.org/efandi/ch25.asp
The main treatise of Karl Marx is Das Kapital. It was designed to provide a scientific justification of the ideas Marx had expressed in his numerous pamphlets and manifestos. Only the first volume of this book was published by Marx himself in 1867. Two years after the death of Marx his friend Engels published the second volume and finally, in 1894, eleven years after the death of Marx, the third volume, which consists of two parts, 870 pages altogether. Yet, the book remained unfinished. The third volume contains 51 chapters; then follows a 52nd one-page chapter that is headed "The Classes." There Marx declares that the first question to be answered is what constitutes a class. But he does not provide an answer. Instead we read a note by the editor, Engels, saying: Here the manuscript breaks off.
One could be tempted to say: It is really tragic. Here is an author to whom fate denied the opportunity to define and to explain the fundamental concept of his philosophy, the concept on which all he said, argued and planned depended. At the hour in which he was to write down the most important thing he had to tell mankind, death took him off. How lamentable!
But a closer inspection reveals a different aspect of the case. The abundant biographical material about Marx collected and published by his followers and the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow evinces the fact that Marx had ceased to work on his book many years before his death. There cannot be any doubt about the reason. When faced with the task of telling in precise words what he had in mind when perorating about "social classes" and giving reasons for his doctrine of the irreconcilable conflict of interests between the "social classes," Marx failed thoroughly. He had to acknowledge to himself that he was perplexed and was at his wit's end. He did not know what to say in the planned 52nd chapter of the third volume and this embarrassment induced him to desist from finishing his great treatise. The essential dogma of the Marxian philosophy, the class conflict doctrine which he and his friend Engels had propagated for many decades, was unmasked as a flop.
IP Khalifah
February 27th, 2011 at 11:55 am
We are all muslims seeking jannat Allah SWT avoid his Nar.
Sans Flag pins
February 27th, 2011 at 3:39 pm
Someone compliment this program so I can give it a thumbs up.
Dave Boyer
February 27th, 2011 at 6:24 pm
Thanks for pointing out how classes and class struggles don't exist . Nice to know we are all Capitalists or some variant thereof…..
I am not a scholar of Marx. (In fact anytime I have tried to read Marx I become easily bored and easily distracted( Von Mises is even worse!!)) I do know there is much Marx left incomplete/unfinished, he didn't write much about Socialism, for instance. Classes he did write about and understood they were developed and changed by culture, history and the machinations of Political Economy. Others have cobbled together (re)interpreted and further developed his writings/theories/understandings of Class, Ralf Dahrendorf for one.
Hacklheber
February 28th, 2011 at 2:50 am
I agree that Mises is sometimes not easy going. But endlessly harking about "class", which is a nebulous concept at best, is non-fruitful. Grandfather worked in the steel industry. Was he "worker class". Am I? Damned if I know. Should I care? Guess not. This is not India.
http://mises.org/daily/4537
"Marx obfuscated the problem by confusing the notions of caste and class. Where status and caste differences prevail, all members of every caste but the most privileged have one interest in common, viz., to wipe out the legal disabilities of their own caste. All slaves, for instance, are united in having a stake in the abolition of slavery. But no such conflicts are present in a society in which all citizens are equal before the law. No logical objection can be advanced against distinguishing various classes among the members of such a society. Any classification is logically permissible, however arbitrarily the mark of distinction may be chosen. But it is nonsensical to classify the members of a capitalistic society according to their position in the framework of the social division of labor and then to identify these classes with the castes of a status society."
langa
February 28th, 2011 at 6:53 am
There is also a libertarian form of class analysis. For an explanation of it, see here: http://mises.org/journals/jls/9_2/9_2_5.pdf
For evidence that the libertarian class analysis actually predates the Marxist version, see here: http://mises.org/daily/2217
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