UFC 300 was an amazing card with crazy knockouts, big storylines and one post-fight speech that spawned interesting discussions on money and human freedom. I don't think anyone from fans watching at the bar to Dana White expected Ludwig von Mises to be the big star of UFC 300 but Renato Moicano's post-fight speech after beating Jailin Turner achieved exactly this.
What I really want to get at is the tie-in between money and freedom though. And here is where Moicano's speech becomes even more interesting. Money isn't just something we make and spend. In many ways, it is a measurement of freedom. There is a reason why people talk about financial freedom. Doing the things we want to do cost money, and if we have little, we are proportionally limited in our options in life. Henceforth, if we are concerned with the degree to which our fellow man is free, we must also be concerned with the degree to which our fellow man is prosperous. Perhaps, this is a different way of looking at the fact that the most prosperous countries are also the most politically and socially free (and vice-versa).
Why Mises
All this in mind, the next question is why Mises? To answer it, we need to know a thing or two about the man himself. Ludwig von Mises was born in Galicia to a Jewish-Austrian family in 1881. He was a lawyer and economist by training and spent time as a war economist during WW1 for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A student of Carl Menger, Mises would prove instrumental in refining and expanding Menger’s ideas, becoming one of the leading lights of what we now know as the Austrian School Of Economics. He would find his way to Switzerland and then to America in 1940 as Nazism took over his homeland. He would spend the rest of his life in New York, dying there in 1973.
The literary legacy of Mises rests chiefly on two major works, The Theory Of Money And Credit (1912), and Human Action (1949), which presents his praxeological case for the laissez-faire capitalism that the Austrian School epouses. His two major criticisms of socialism also straddled the European and American chapters of his life. Socialism: An Economic And Sociological Analysis (1922) is an examination of economic inequality and a refutation of the socialist critiques of capitalism from that period and also an in depth demonstration of the inferiority of socialism compared to the free market system. The Anti-Capitalist Mentality (1956) delves more into the psychology of anti-capitalism, particularly among intellectuals. There are other works on liberalism, interventionism and so on, but in the interest of time I will leave the reader to delve further into this.
Today, the legacy of Mises can be felt in the work of Nobel Prize winner Freidrich von Hayek and particularly in his seminal work, The Road To Serfdom (1944). I should note that Hayek had been a regular attendee of seminars hosted by Mises and had been influenced into the classical liberalism that he would epouse by Mises’ Socialism (1922). Another Nobel laureate strongly associated with the ideas of Mises was the American Milton Friedman, whose ideas exert enormous influence in American public policy to this day and whose former students (known as the Chicago Boys) led the sweeping economic reforms of 1970's and 1980's Chile which are still a subject of study (and hot debate) in contemporary Latin America. Speaking of contemporary Latin America, a new admirer of Mises has entered the scene recently, in the form of firebrand Argentinian president Javier Milei (an economist by training), and his agenda of sweeping economic reforms. Like Mises, Milei has often explored the moral case for capitalism, ideas that he distilled in a rather elegant way during a TED Talk years ago given in Argentina.
Six Lessons Mo*********ers
Enough context. Let's go into what became the unexpected star of UFC 300.
The Six Lessons came to be from a series of 1959 lectures Mises gave in Buenos Aires. In English, this became a book called Economic Policy: Thoughts For Today And Tomorrow (1979). In Brazil though, this was rather neatly rebranded into As Seis Liçoes which is convenient because Mises organized his lectures along six major themes. You can read the whole thing here. (If you care about your f***ing country.) If you prefer a brief overview, you can read an overview here.
At their core, the Six Lessons are a neat encapsulation of a socio-economic worldview shaped by growing up and living through the most tumultuous period of modern history. Mises came of age in what novelist Hermann Broch called “the joyful apocalypse”. These were, of course, the final years of an Austro-Hungarian Empire in terminal decline. This was made painfully apparent as the empire met its agonizing demise in the destructive aftermath of WW1. It was also the death of the Europe that was, the final collapse of the post Napoleonic order of things concocted by Metternich at the 1814 Congress of Vienna. And yet, this period of decline was a boon of intellectual advancement in all realms of thought, from the arts to political and economic theory. It's as if creativity itself was emitting one last desperate plea for help on behalf of a dying empire.
What emerged from the tumult of collapsing empires and revolution was a world vacillating between the strictly planned, highly centralized and authoritarian orders of the USSR, Italy and later Germany, and the liberal, free market order symbolized by America and to a lesser degree the British Empire. The interwar period for Mises was also not exactly the roaring 20’s that Americans experienced and yet Austria was not spared the ravages of the depression. In a world torn between liberalism and authoritarianism, Mises would emerge as a champion for the former, but would be forced to abandon his homeland due to the ravages of the latter. Mises was a Jew. There was no place for him in an Austria growing ever closer to Hitler's Germany. Moving across continents and watching from afar the terrible destruction visited upon Europe again by WW2. The final chapter in the life of Mises was lived in the backdrop of the Cold War, with its political and ideological competition. His final years were spent in an America going through everything from McCarthyism, the Civil Rights struggle and the internal unrest caused by the Vietnam War.
I won't summarize the lessons themselves since I provided the links already. I want you to read them for yourselves and evaluate them without me inadvertently injecting biases or taking anything Mises says in the lectures out of context. What I will go into next is why I think this post-fight speech was interesting and important.
Why Renato Moicano's Post-Fight Speech Matters
As Mises noted in closing off the last of his six Lessons, there are good ideas being propagated to replace the bad ideas on economic and political advancement propagated by politicians and influencers today. They just need more notoriety. If you ask a random twenty something in the street before UFC 300, I'd bet a good eighty percent would not know the name Mises, or the term Austrian School. Thanks to a viral post-fight speech, Mises is a trend on social media and a new generation of curious minds is now being exposed to a different take on free markets, why they worked, and why they continue to work for the common people.
Of course, Mises is one economist. Curiosity in Mises will hopefully spawn curiosity in Hayek, Friedman, Morgenstern and Kirzner. Thanks to Renato Moicano, the Austrian School became cool again. Learning about economics, the socio-political dynamics that work in tandem with economics and so on, is important. It is particularly important to understand the history of money, the influences of collective human behavior on human prosperity, and so forth. We care about understanding money not because we want to be billionaires but because we accept that we need it to survive and that the degree of freedom we can enjoy in our day to day lives has a dependency on our financial wherewithal. That is inescapable. But given the extensive and sometimes complicated nature of economics, it can be hard to know where to start. In this light, I love that Moicano recommended Mises and his six lessons because nor only are these a distillation of a lifetime of economic thought, but they are articulated in a way that is accessible to anyone as Moicano himself remarked during his recent interview with Ariel Helwani. Paying attention to what you're reading is all you need to do to understand the line of thinking.
At a more general level though, it is important to be intellectually curious in life. Knowledge is how we make ourselves less prone to manipulation by demagogues. Sadly, Latin America has a long history of countries falling into the jaws of ‘know-nothing, do nothing’ kleptocrats who have stunted progress for much of the two centuries that passed since the independence movements of the 19th century. And here in the north, we find ourselves in increasing peril of losing the great societies that past generations of Cnadians and Americans built. The siren-like voices of the 20th century's failed ‘-isms’ still seduce many of our young. The fact that universities around the US and Canada are still filled with students and professors who seriously believe that Che Guevara and Yasser Arafat were heroic freedom fighters rather than the lowest of murderers, grifters and thieves, that the deeply impoverished, brutal and unfair societies of the former USSR and Maoist China are somehow worth emulating, is a brutal indictment of the pervasive level of ignorance that we allow to permeate our societies. And I will add that there is no longer any excuse to be seduced by such ideas either. We live in the information age, where the average citizen can simply search on their phone and read all about the murderous, impoverishing and deeply unfair legacy of Marxism-Leninism. The same holds for those who insist on diminishing the similarly disastrous effects of fascism on Hitler’s Germany, Tojo’s Japan, and Mussolini’s Italy. The slope is slippery and the loss of our freedoms is never far away if we fail to be good keepers of the flame, as Hayek warned us in The Road To Serfdom (1944).
Really, there is no excuse to simp for any form of autocracy or arbitrarily planned economy anymore. History has shown these to be abjectly ineffective relative to liberal democracy and free markets at the task of generating prosperity. What Marx disparagingly christened “capitalism” is not some toxic system to be overthrown, an indictment on the pervasiveness of human greed or whatever else. It turned out to be a rather convenient framework for accelerating human development. It turned out that allowing people to tap into their inherent creativity and allowing them to enrich themselves on the basis of the value they could provide their peers works far better than micromanaging them and concentrating all decision making in a small, self-appointed elite. We are two hundred years of evidence bearing witness to that fact, especially those of us who live in Canada and the United States. The story of capitalism is not one of exploitation and unfairness, but of human progress. For all of its flaws, real and imagined, capitalism works, or as Irish blogger Mark Humphrys elegantly put it, “capitalism is heroic”. (Side Note: Humphrys also cites the wonderful essay “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read. You can listen to a reading of it here.)
Also, when Renato Moicano says in his post-fight speech that he loves private property and the First Amendment, all he’s saying is he loves what allowed man to climb from the swamps to the stars. (to borrow Ronald Reagan’s line from his “Time For Choosing” speech in 1964) Our ancestors from the distant past were seldom able to claim anything as their own no matter how hard they worked, because under feudalism, you were largely fixed to whatever run of the social ladder you were born into. We can today because we evolved from feudalism into a much better system that grew out of the Dutch Republic into the writings of Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, and later Mises and so forth. Our ancestors were also unable to pressure the government into bettering the conditions of the common man, nor can our peers who live in the unfree world of planned economies and where there exists no equivalent to the First Amendment. We can, and we do.
The foundation of classical liberalism and a free market economy as promoted by Mises in the Six Lessons also helped bring out the amazing fight card we all got to enjoy at UFC 300. Someone figured that they could add value by creating a sport where fighters from different technical backgrounds could face each other to see which martial art was superior. From there, there were fighters who benefited from this insight and who in turn benefited others by providing entertainment and an example of human tenacity to millions around the world. This sport, violent and animalistic as it may be derided by its critics, allowed men like Jose Aldo and Charles Oliveira for example, to rise from the grinding poverty of the favela to being able to provide a life for their families that they otherwise wouldn’t have through their hard work and determination. Like Leonard Read’s pencil, the emergence of MMA as the mainstream sport it is today, and employer of thousands, is yet another collection of little miracles made possible by the specialized talents and creativity of people that we may or may not see.
Where I’m trying to get with all this is that Mises and his Six Lessons were always hiding in plain sight within the world of MMA. What Renato Moicano did was bring him out into the open. And it’s good that used his platform for this. Sports and athletes can do a lot for the common good. Jackie Robinson dealt a heroic early hammer blow to Jim Crow. The “democracia corinthiana” of Socrates and the Corinthians Football Club of the 1980’s helped end decades of military dictatorship in their own small way. Now, with one viral speech, Brazilians are being exposed en masse to a view of free market economies, and human freedom in general, that the current Brazilian government would rather they not be exposed to. Brazil is not a poor country. In fact, it is rich, in resources, in natural beauty, and most importantly, in human capital. Its leadership has failed it, and driven them down a road of failed ideas that impoverish the people, robbing them of the fullness of their potential. The same can be said of the rest of Latin America. But we know that if one country rises from the ashes, others will follow. Understanding the relationship between human freedom and human prosperity will be critical to getting there for both Moicano’s native Brazil and the rest of the continent like my parents’ native El Salvador. Here is where the insights of Mises as distilled in the Six Lessons can help us, so it’s good that his name is out there again to help us achieve a decisive knockout (or submission) victory over poverty once and for all.
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