Presenting the facts of life for small countries without oil or other valuable natural endowment, von Mises wrote:
As a mountainous country with poor soil and few natural resources, Austria must rely on industrial activity to feed a population of six and a half million people. As an agrarian nation, [it] could at best eke out enough food for a population of one to two million… To be an industrial country requires being predominantly an importer of raw materials and food and an exporter of industrial products…
The mainstays of such an organism,” von Mises pointed out, “are the entrepreneurs of the export industry who have the know-how to produce [competitive] goods for the world market. The industrial and commercial genius of these entrepreneurs creates work and livelihood for all the other citizens…
By von Mises’ estimate, “Old Austria produced about one thousand men of this kind.” Von Mises recognized what David C. McClelland saw in America in his Achieving Society and what Edward Roberts and Charles Eesley discovered in “Entrepreneurial Impact” among MIT graduates. The leading entrepreneurial talent of the world is disproportionately Jewish. As von Mises observed about the entrepreneurs of the once-flourishing Austrian economy: “At least two-thirds of these one thousand men were Jews… They are gone, scattered around the world, and trying to start again from scratch.”
Not only Jewish entrepreneurs were driven out of the economy. The hatred of Jews epitomizes a general resentment of excellence and creativity. “Tax offices [as instruments of redistribution] were filled with a blind hate against ‘plutocrats’” of all races and creeds. Moreover, technical talent and middle management are a crucial complement to entrepreneurial genius. Much of the most productive middle management of Austrian companies was also Jewish. Of the some 250 thousand Jews in Austria in 1938, according to von Mises, only 216 individuals survived the war without leaving the country.
Von Mises concludes: “The so-called Aryanization of firms was based on the Marxist idea that capital (resources and equipment) and labor… were the only vital ingredients of an enterprise, whereas the entrepreneur was an exploiter. An enterprise without entrepreneurial spirit and creativity, however, is nothing more than a pile of rubbish and old iron.” Austria was left with many piles of rubbish and old iron. Its newly Judenrein industrial economy, once an economic miracle of export-led growth and a paragon of European commerce, would never recover its leading role.
Growing up in Austria during the period described by von Mises was Adolf Hitler, whose original surname was Schicklgruber. Explaining this Austrian catastrophe and similar disasters in Hungary is the set of ideas and assumptions in Hitler’s personal manifesto, Mein Kampf. Autobiography, creedal testament, anti-Jewish cri de cœur, and National Socialist agenda, Hitler’s book is a dense, tortuous, and repetitious screed, suitable for consignment to the dustbins of history like its demonic author.
Mein Kampf, however, is anything but a historical relic. Banned by the Israelis when they ruled the West Bank, it became popular there when the Palestinian Authority took over. With every new Arabic edition it crops up on best-seller lists and bookstore displays across the Middle East. It loomed in menacing piles in the airport bookstore in Jordan. Israeli soldiers rooting through Arafat’s possessions abandoned in southern Lebanon in 1982 discovered many copies at all his base camps. Its rhetorical idiom of “pigs”… “jackals”… “bacteria”… “vampires”… “parasites”… “vermin”… and “vultures” recurs in the speeches of Osama bin Laden of al-Qaida, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad, and thousands of imams throughout Islamic lands.
As familiar and consequential as this book is, it is strangely misunderstood. It has been reviewed thousands of times without any grasp of the central theme of its case against the Jews. Critics notice the references to Jews as “an inferior race… the incarnation of Satan and the symbol of evil.” Cited are Hitler’s references to the Jewish mastery of the press, manipulation of propaganda and public opinion, and the Jew’s devious “benevolence” and charity as “manure” applied as fertilizer for “future returns.” Critics comment upon Hitler’s celebration of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, now ubiquitous in the Arab world, and that book’s claims of an insidious Masonic conspiracy controlled by Jews throughout history. Hitler’s antipathy toward the Jews emerges as a bizarre and phantasmagorical obsession, as a demented chimera, or as a paranoid fantasy unrelated to the sophisticated attitudes toward Israel and Jews now widely upheld in faculty lounges, international organizations, television talk shows, and noted journals of opinion and newspapers of record.
To Hitler, however, Jews are anathema, not chiefly because of such exotic figments as their alleged racial inferiority or their demonic Satanism or their perennial Masonic intrigues, but because of a far more common and fashionable complaint still widely voiced at Harvard, Berkeley, and around the globe. Hitler’s case against the Jews focuses on their mastery of capitalism.
As von Mises observed, more than two-thirds of the leading entrepreneurs in Austria at the time were Jewish. The focus of Hitler’s racial theory in chapters ten and eleven of Mein Kampf is his resentment and paranoia toward Jewish prowess in finance and enterprise. The Jew’s “commercial cunning… made him superior in this field to the Aryans,” he wrote, and turned “finance and trade” into “his complete monopoly… The Jew… organized capitalistic methods of exploitation to their ultimate degree of efficiency.”
In a theme later adopted by Osama bin Laden, Hitler asserts that the key to initial Jewish success was “his usurious rate of interest.” He cites the immemorial notion that Jews gain an economic foothold by mulcting others through their prowess as shysters and shylocks, ensnaring “ingenuous” Aryans in webs of debt. Blind to the nature of capitalism, Hitler condemns interest as illegitimate gain, the embezzled returns of dispensable middlemen. Then he makes an elaborate case that Jews parlay their insidious middleman strategy into a broader economic dominance, first in banking and finance and then in all commerce and industry. He implies that their resulting affluence and ostentation will ultimately bring them down. Projecting on others his own revulsion, Hitler contended: “The increasing impudence which the Jew began to manifest all round stirred up popular indignation, while his display of wealth gave rise to popular envy.”
Adumbrating Mearsheimer and Walt on Jewish lobbying prowess, Hitler spoke of the Jew as an “eternal profiteer,” mitigating popular hostility by paying “court to governments with servile flattery [and] used his money to ingratiate himself further…”
While sneering at Jewish lack of connection to the soil, Hitler wrote: “The cup of [Jewish] iniquity became full to the brim when he included landed property among his commercial wares and degraded the soil to the level of a market commodity. Since he himself never cultivated the soil but considered it as an object to be exploited, on which the peasant may still remain but only on condition that he submits to the most heartless exactions of his new master.” This theme now pervades facile journalist coverage of the Palestinian territories, where water for agriculture is allocated chiefly to Jewish farms that pay for it by profitable use of the irrigated land.
Referring to Zionism, Hitler wrote, “They have not the slightest intention of building up a Jewish State in Palestine so as to live in it. What they really are aiming at is to establish a central organization for their international swindling and cheating,” which is Hitler’s characterization of Jewish enterprise.