Richard Ebeling has a new article on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation (FFF) on, “Moritz J. Bonn: Classical Liberal Voice in a Collectivist World”:
We are living at a time when the trends seem to be leaning more and more in the direction of greater government control, regulation, redistribution, and planning. This, unfortunately, is part of a movement that has been going on for well over a century, especially beginning in the Great Depression years of the 1930s.
Though seemingly forgotten in our own time, there were a good number of voices who reasonably and forthrightly spoke out against these trends in that earlier period between the two World Wars, in the 1920s and 1930s. One of those articulate voices was the German, free market liberal, Moritz J. Bonn. Well known in both Great Britain and the United States during that era, he responded to the interventionist and collectivist policies in his own homeland of Germany and in other places. Forced to leave Germany in 1933 with the rise of Nazism to power, Bonn was a friend of Ludwig von Mises and a colleague of F.A. Hayek at the London School of Economics after leaving Germany and before moving to America; he was considered an authority on colonialism and imperialism.
In my article this week, I highlight Bonn’s classical liberal criticisms of, for instance, the government policies during the Great Depression, in which he explained that the depth and duration of the depression was mostly due to political interference with prices, wages and competition through various forms of government regulation and restrictive planning. And how this was exacerbated by government-imposed protectionist barriers to freedom of trade
He also strongly defended the ethics and efficiency of markets and the competitive process against those who insisted that “capitalism” was unjust and pandering to the lowest values in society. Instead, he focused on the dynamism of liberal capitalism in fostering not only innovation and material improvements in the human condition, but facilitated wider avenues for cultural betterment and choice as well.
Moritz J. Bonn is a classical liberal, free market voice from the period of the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s who still has much to tell us in understanding the importance of competitive capitalism and the dangers from the heavy hand of interventionist and centrally planning government. Insights, that are still relevant today in the face of the latest trends in a more collectivist direction.
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