Falsification of History

There are things we won't recall
And feelings we'll never find
It's taken so long to see it
'Cause we never seemed to have the time
--Phil Collins

In a series of essays first published in 1952, Mises penned "How Modern History is Taught" which essentially described the propaganda war against capitalism waged primarily by historians, teachers of social science, journalists, and other intellectuals. In this excerpt, Mises notes many of the urban legends perpetuated by the propagandists, including:

Life was better prior to the Industrial Revolution. Capitalists converted plenty into scarcity.

Central planning is the preferred way to organize economically. Currently floundering experiments with central planning suffer only from not have the right bureaucrats in charge of production and distribution decisions.

The enemy of the common man is business.

The rise of industry rose not out of the demands of the ordinary person, but of the rich. Business caters to the needs of the few, not the many.

Diseases and other social problems today have, at their root cause, capitalism to blame.

Sixty plus years after Mises wrote this essay, little has changed in the propaganda war against capitalism. Hampered markets, the hallmark of socialism, perpetuate the falsification of history.