Socialism by the Dose

Socialism by the Dose

In 1947, at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, the free-market conference in Switzerland, august Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises harrumphed that young Milton Friedman and many other budding anti-socialists of those dark days of mid-century Western culture were, in reality, “all a bunch of socialists.”

Mises stormed out of the room.

I thought of this when I heard that Jon Stewart had defended himself from Roger Ailes’s “socialism” charge. Ailes said that the Daily Show host had once confessed, in a bar, to being a “socialist.” On Stewart’s...