Article by Colonel Nogov on Feb. 6, 2015
I began studying economics about 10 years ago. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it put me on the path to anarchism. 10 years ago, I, Colonel Nogov was a statist. Not a fully indoctrinated red team/blue team variety, but not a minarchist either. Up to that time, I had never voted, I just kind of accepted government as being part of what made the world go round.
Economics changed all that. The internet was a great benefit, I could research economics without leaving home. I could do it in my spare time when I wasn’t working. Economics became my obsession. I wanted to understand everything about it. It was fascinating. Nothing like I had learned in my compulsory government education.
It started with the main stream economists, the keynesians(I call them the pseudo economists). Their stuff was very “technical”, I guess you’d say. It required a lot of fancy formulas. It sounded impressive. It also didn’t work. Not in the real world anyway. People just wouldn’t conform to their theories, economic models, you name it. I view the keynesians as backwards. They have their economic models and their formulas, and they seem great, in theory anyway, but then they try to get the people to fit into their models. People just don’t work that way.
Then I found the monetarists. The Milton Friedman types. They came much closer to true economists. They believed in free markets and freedom in general. Their flaw was putting faith in the government to control the money supply.
I, of course, would soon discover the true economists, the current label is Austrian Economists because of Mises, but it goes back much farther. True economists study the behavior of people. They observe and discover Laws of Economics. (read my previous article how laws are determined here). They write down what they discover. They observe and write down the effects of government on economics. Inflation, price fixing, prohibition, licensing, central banking, the business cycle, etc. Their conclusions are irrefutable. They don’t try to conform the people to their models, they observe the people to reach conclusions.
The funny thing about the keynesians and the Austrians is that, the Austrians easily refute keynesian economics, but the keynesians can’t refute the Austrians, though it doesn’t stop them from bending themselves into pretzels trying. Why anyone even listens to the keynesians, outside of government, is beyond me. Governments listen because governments love keynesians. The keynesians tell the politicians what they want to hear. They tell them the economy can be fixed by doing this or that using the force of government. Of course, it can’t. What it does do is gives more money and power to politicians and their cronies and that’s all they want.
So back to why the study of economics leads to Anarchism. I guess the main reason is that the study of economics is fundamentally about the study of human behavior. As you study economics, studying the effects of government on people and economics is unavoidable. You begin to see the government for what it is. An evil entity feeding on people like a vampire. It destroys their freedom. It destroys their prosperity. It destroys their lives.
Most, if not all, of the anarchist I know are well versed in economics. This correlation became more and more clear to me as the years went by. If you are a minarchist, study economics. Study the greats, Adam Smith, Bastiat, Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, and especially Rothbard. Study the pseudos as well, Marx and Keynes.