The Pope’s an important religious leader, but he’s not a Catholic.

Jimi Hendrix was a great musician, but he didn’t play the guitar.

Ludwig von Mises was a fine economist, but he wasn’t part of the Austrian School.

All of the above would seem so false, that they hardly require refutation. Indeed, when confronted with such absurdity, one does pause, wondering, if someone can assert such things in the face of all evidence to the contrary, what can be added? And why bother?

For those of you unaware of the case, Max Keiser, financial journalist and presenter, has decided to declare war on libertarians, or as he would have it, ‘fake libertarians’, and his jumping-off point was an interview with an economist, Sandeep Jaitly, who put forth the notion that Mises could not possibly be an Austrian, as his views contradicted those of Carl Menger, the acknowledged founding member of the Austrian School. The fact that this Jaitly also named Mises as the greatest economist of the 20th century during the same interview has been overlooked.

There are two aspects to this. Firstly; Jaitly’s head-scratchingly strange interpretation of Mises work, which cannot even be sustained through the first paragraph of the introduction of Mises’ most important work ‘Human Action’, and secondly Keiser and his sidekick Stacey using Jaitly’s views to open an attack on libertarianism, using all the confused and contradictory ad hominems you can imagine. Not only are libertarians seeking to implement an Old Testament theocracy (that’s right folks), we are also Randian cultists. That Ayn Rand was about as vociferious an atheist as ever lived does not apparently prevent our eagerness to institute the precepts of Deuteronomy.

What it really boils down to is; if you think Lew Rockwell is a neo-con war-monger, there’s nothing I can think of to say which will contradict this. If anyone is unsure, being unfamiliar with the man, just randomly pick any interview or speech he’s ever given or any article or book he’s ever written, and I’m confident you will come to the correct conclusion.

It may seem pointless to comment on Max’s inanity, but following in his wake seems something of a concerted attack on Mises, Rothbard and libertarianism from the Left. Rather than an honest fight, we are labeled ‘fake-libertarians’, the implication being that true libertarianism is to be found in communistic collectivism. Indeed so, just as ‘War is Peace’ and ‘Freedom is Slavery’.

The only legitimate aspect of Max’s attacks are on that faction of the American right, who are happy to sound libertarian on social policy, but never when it comes to resisting the ever-growing, anti-Constitutional power of the Federal state. Libertarians are well aware of how the Tea Party movement has been largely taken over, in order to make it a creature of the Republican Party, but to use this fact as a weapon against the likes of Lew Rockwell is asinine.