"To sum up Keynes: arrogant, sadistic, power-besotted bully, deliberate
and systemic liar, intellectually irresponsible, an opponent of
principle..." -- Murray Rothbard
I read Rothbard's history of economic thought (the first volume, at least) around two years ago... I don't think I've read very many Austrians take on the history of economic thought since. It's honestly made me lose confidence in what I read -- it's hard for me to take a lot of criticisms of other ideas seriously, when I can't even be sure that the criticism attacks the actual idea. Salerno's recent post on free banking solidifies this fear.
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.
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
I read Rothbard's history of economic thought (the first volume, at least) around two years ago... I don't think I've read very many Austrians take on the history of economic thought since. It's honestly made me lose confidence in what I read -- it's hard for me to take a lot of criticisms of other ideas seriously, when I can't even be sure that the criticism attacks the actual idea. Salerno's recent post on free banking solidifies this fear.
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