George Reisman’s whole article today is excellent, but I especially appreciate what he has to say about Marx’s influence on the popular understanding of … well, everything:

The Laissez-Faire Myth and the Marxism of the Media

The myth that laissez faire exists in the present-day United States and is responsible for our current economic crisis is promulgated by people who know practically nothing whatever of sound, rational economic theory or the actual nature of laissez-faire capitalism. They espouse it despite, or rather because of, their education at the leading colleges and universities of the country. When it comes to matters of economics, their education has steeped them entirely in the thoroughly wrong and pernicious doctrines of Marx and Keynes. In claiming to see the existence of laissez faire in the midst of such massive government interference as to constitute the very opposite of laissez faire, they are attempting to rewrite reality in order to make it conform with their Marxist preconceptions and view of the world.

They absorb the doctrines of Marx more in history, philosophy, sociology, and literature classes than in economics classes. The economics classes, while usually not Marxist themselves, offer only highly insufficient rebuttal of the Marxist doctrines and devote almost all of their time to espousing Keynesianism and other, less-well-known anticapitalistic doctrines, such as the doctrine of pure and perfect competition.

Very few of the professors and their students have read so much as a single page of the writings of Ludwig von Mises, who is the preeminent theorist of capitalism and knowledge of whose writings is essential to its understanding. Almost all of them are thus essentially ignorant of sound economics.

When I refer to the educational system and the media as Marxist, I do not intend to imply that its members favor any kind of forcible overthrow of the United States government or are necessarily even advocates of socialism. What I mean is that they are Marxists insofar as they accept Marx’s views concerning the nature and operation of laissez-faire capitalism.

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