Steve, They Aren't Listening

By -
My friend Steve Horwitz tried to explain what Austrian economics is and isn't.

But I fear Steve casts pearls before swine; see this article, in which the author "defines" Austrian economics as:

"What's more, Paul is a big believer in Austrian economic thought – the idea that government has no role in regulating the economy."

Because, you know, that's exactly what Friedrich von Wieser thought.

Comments

  1. Unknown4:18 PM

    The impression that was left on me by the Mises blog was that Austrian Economics is the brainstorming of elaborate government conspiracies. Who knew that chlorofluorocarbons and mental illnesses were just nefarious fabrications to keep humanity in the dark and something something big pharma...

    I can see the legacy of Mises shining brightly in wisdom spouted by the MI blog contributers.

    http://blog.mises.org/15069/mental-illnesses-among-college-students/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lord Keynes4:34 AM

    I have written on this subject myself:

    http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2010/10/friedrich-von-wieser-and-eugen-von.html

    Eugen von Philippovich von Philippsberg and Friedrich von Wieser are fascinating.

    According to Hayek, von Wieser was even "slightly tainted with Fabian socialist sympathies" (Ebenstein, A. O. 2005. Hayek’s Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, p. 26).

    Even some of the less well known third-generation Austrian economists were reflexively hostile to government, e.g., Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan:

    http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com/2010/12/different-types-of-austrian-economics.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lord Keynes3:48 AM

    Correction:

    "Even some of the less well known third-generation Austrian economists were NOT reflexively hostile "

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more