By Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute | October 01, 2024
The videos coming out of western North Carolina, of entire towns wiped off the map by flood waters of Hurricane Helene, are both tragic and shocking. Lesser, but serious, impacts have been felt across the entire region. The residents of much of southern Appalachia, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas are facing temporary shortages in terms of access to clear water, power, and fuel.
For some social-media bomb throwers, however, the floods are an excellent opportunity to attack both private property and immigrant business owners.
On Monday, Twitter/X user “Washingtons ghost” posted a video that allegedly shows a gas station owner in Georgia charging ten dollars per gallon for gasoline. The poster portrayed this as illegal price gouging. The post has received 1.9 million views.
Lest we think this was a mere fit a pique on the part of “Washingtons ghost,”—who has nearly 150,000 followers—the larger subtext is revealed if we look at responses to the post. It quickly becomes apparent that the post’s author is not a fan of private property and he is also troubled by the fact that the property owners in question appear to be immigrants of Indian origin.
“Washingtons ghost” follows up his initial post with a comment on how “All they [i.e, business owners] do is extract.” He then adds that small business owners of foreign origin have “no attachment to the community.” Marx could not have said it better himself.
The same video then received an additional 1.5 million views after being picked up by a self-proclaimed “Paleoconservative” and “MAGA-Hulk” who calls himself “Lucky.” Lucky condemns “legal immigrants”—the scare quotes are his—for providing goods and services at a price Lucky doesn’t like. Another X/Twitter user posts a follow-up video in which the video’s creator celebrates the fact that the business owners—perhaps tired of dealing with the property-rights-hating mob—have closed down for the time being. “We sent the Pakis packin!” the man in the video gleefully cries. So, now no one gets any gasoline, and this, we are told, is a reason to celebrate.
When some readers suggested to Lucky that property owners should be able to sell their property at whatever price they prefer, Lucky declared “I don’t believe in the free market.” Other commenters encouraged locals to report the business owners to the authorities, while others demanded a boycott of the business.
These exchanges are illuminating in several ways. The first is that they show how many self-proclaimed “loyal Americans” are no longer interested in defending private property. The general narrative here is that private business owners are somehow required to “share” their property with the mob at prices that the mob demands. Secondly, we discover that, should these business owners not “share” enough, then we are to report the business owners to the state.
We’ve seen this sort of thing many times throughout history, of course. Wherever private property is not respected, some people are sure to demand that the more successful members of the community be made to “share” the wealth. The Soviet Union offers countless examples. For example, in the first decades of the Soviet regime, many rural villages were home to local busybodies who were happy to snitch on their neighbors for “speculation”—the legal name for the “crime” of private enterprise in Soviet times. The mass-arrests and deportations of the Kulaks in Stalin’s time were in many cases facilitated by locals who hated their more successful neighbors. The idea was that these neighbors were not paying their “fair share” and therefore were ripe for being denounced to the local communist authorities.
Essentially, modern-day conservatives and MAGA activists who tell us to turn in local business owners for “price gouging,” are on the same moral plane as these snitches of Soviet villages of old.
Nor is it surprising that these enemies of private property also include the element of a foreign menace in their denunciations of private property rights. The obsession with foreigners is often part and parcel of anti-capitalist ideological movements. The National Socialists, of course, rooted much of their anti-Semitism on resentment against Jewish capitalists. In the Soviet Union, it was also common to tie the crime of free enterprise to “Western” bourgeois “decadence” introduced into the Soviet economy by alleged foreign fifth-columnists. The NKVD (i.e., what later became the KGB) was often dedicated to tracking down Soviet citizens suspected of “having, or having had, ties” with alleged foreign elements. Frequently, this just meant Soviet citizens descended from non-Russian ethnic groups.
Reasonable people, of course, have little problem with immigrants who come to the US and build up businesses through investment and hard work. This—in contrast to the criminals and subsidized paupers presently favored by the Biden Administration—is what immigration is supposed to look like. In many cases, these entrepreneurial immigrants are filling a gap in the local market. In the case of businesses like gas stations and dry cleaners, for example, turning a profit requires long hours, few (or no) vacations, and the risk of failure in a highly competitive market. These businesses are often family-owned precisely because profitability relies on cheap family labor staffing these shops for six or seven days per week.
Yet, in an age when small businesses are being systematically attacked and impoverished by the regime, the “loyal Americans” on paleocon social media spend their time attacking the local small-time capitalists for imagined crimes against the community.
Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.
Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is executive editor at the Mises Institute, and a former economist for the State of Colorado.
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