Someone Has Missed Something

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I ran across this:

"Back in August I had an interesting talk with Richard Maybury, an economist of the Austrian school and editor of the financial newsletter Early Warning Report. He is the author of a big idea, actually a model with which to help predict long term trends in global politics and finance. It's called Chaostan, and basically it means that enlighenment ideas of liberty and property never made it past Marx in Germany in their natural spread eastward..."

So, this fellow is supposed to be an Austrian, and he creates models that "predict" history and thinks that ideas have a "natural spread?!

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy9:58 PM

    Did not Mises, Rothbard and Raimondo predict the fall of the Soviet Union based of the fact that communism doesn't work?

    I don't know about the other two, but I'm pretty sure Mises didn't. (If anyone has a relevant quote to prove me wrong, by all means I'd love to see it.)

    I don't mean to go off on your comment too much, Scott, but this is something that I think a lot of Austrians misinterpret. They say something like this: "Mises claimed in 1920 that socialism was impossible, and the fall of the Soviet Union proved him right." I don't think I need to spell out why this (typical) formulation is just plain silly.

    Anyway, what Mises did say was that socialist economy was impossible, from day one. I.e. it wasn't that it would take time for it to finally catch up with the central plenners; no, from the beginning, they would not be able to retionally allocate resources. But that is a different proposition from saying, "Not enough stuff would get produced to keep the masses from revolting."

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