- For decades, a mysterious visitor has left roses and a half-finished bottle of cognac at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe, in Baltimore. Last year he did not show, and people feared the worst. This year he did not show either. This probably means - nevermore.
- The Social Democracy for the 21st Century blog has a post up on FH Hahn on gluts in a monetary economy. Brad DeLong engages somewhat similar issues here. This is a good line where he notes that Marxists miss the point that Keynes made (and Hahn recognized): "The original errors [of the Marxists] are that the divorces between exchange value and use value and the wedges between private profits and social returns have absolutely nothing to do with overaccumulation crises--Hayek and company, after all, manage to construct a perfectly coherent and functional model of overaccumulation crises without them at all."
- Waseem Wagdi in London on the Egyptian protests:
Steve Horwitz also had a post yesterday on the spontaneous order of self-government that we are seeing in Egypt. This is exactly the way we need to think about self-government. The one objection I have to point in Steve's post that I would take special care to clarify and emphasize is the way he contrasts this with "the state" (i.e. Mubarak) in a way that could suggest to some people suggests that the spontaneous order that is emerging is not a state-like entity. He's referring to neighborhood watch type organizations that are emerging. They are armed. They require people to produce identification. I have no doubt at all that they will use violence if necessary to protect their neighborhood. They are, in a word - coercive. And they are good and they are a spontaneous order and consistent with liberty. And the spontaneous order that is emerging out of this crisis is a proto-state and will evolve into a new state. This is self-government, people. It happened in the United States too with the committees of correspondence, which laid the foundation for the Continental Congress and the slow evolution of institutions of self-governance that we live under today in the United States. Autocracy can clearly be a leech on these systems of self-governance, and you have to simply judge each government on its own merits. The point is, self-government is an emergent phenomenon. It has to be. If it were imposed from outside it would not be self-government.
- I thought this advertisement by Jeff Tucker at the Mises Institute of "the anti-Keynes collection" was another intriguing look into the mind of the Mises Institute. This line caught my eye: "J.M. Keynes is like Marx in this sense: everyone keeps announcing the death of his thought, but his ideas keep coming back and back. This is not because they work or because they are good ideas but because the fallacies are framed in a way appeal to the statist impulse." I got this same argument from a blogger named Troy Camplin at Coordination Problem recently. I don't think Tucker and Camplin realize how condescending this is, and how absurd it is as an argument (neither of which reflects well on them). He shows absolutely no respect for the insights, intellect, and intentions of his fellow man, which is a shockingly illiberal disposition to have. And how do you refute something like that? If I am really just acting on statist impulses and goals, of course I would lie and deny it! I don't do the statist cause much good if I come clean!
- Finally, C-Span had an interesting discussion of NASA on yesterday's Washington Journal.
- A quick reading update: I am reading Carl Schmitt's Political Theology and finding it fascinating.
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I agree with the third last thing you said.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, von Mises himself was upset about the intellectual atmosphere of his day where nobody took the chance to understand the other party, and decided in advance who represented whose interests. Even outside the scope of liberals like him, conservatives, social democrats, nationalists, and others wrongly smeared each other with lies, and it bothered him.
"Let the example of Germany stand as a warning to us. German Kultur was doomed on the day in 1870 when one of the most eminent German scientists-Emil du Bois-Reymond-could publicly boast, without meeting contradiction, that the University of Berlin was "the intellectual bodyguard of the house of Hohenzollern." Where the universities become bodyguards and the scholars are eager to range themselves in a "scientific front," the gates are open for the entry of barbarism. It is vain to fight totalitarianism by adopting totalitarian methods. Freedom can only be won by men unconditionally committed to the principles of freedom." - Omnipotent Government
That was him criticising a fellow liberal by saying that one of the most respected men of his time had not the ability to respect other men's thoughts and was not committed to freedom of speech. He didn't mean free speech in the sense of lack of government control, but in open-mindedness of people. The OTHER sense.
In one section of the book, he defends a protectionist economist by saying that he was interested in infant industry protectionism only, and was not a nationalist. It reminds me of many instances in which men and women condemning torture are labelled "bleeding hearts". Just for having a position out of basic human empathy, not because they were opportunistic college leftists!
"but because the fallacies are framed in a way appeal to the statist impulse."
ReplyDeleteThis is the universal Mises Institute excuse. If Rothbard was such a genius, why didn't he ever have a decent academic post? Statists! Why do most of their "top scholars" only publish in their house journals? Statists! Why do people keep calling Hoppe a racist? They're statists!
This is unfair Gene. Sometimes they're fascists, and sometimes they're socialists too.
ReplyDeleteWell, I do think Gene is being unfair. There are prob. a lot of people who affiliate themselves unofficially with the Mises Institute, but I don't think any serious scholar there would argue that. That Rothbard's brand of political econ. was not popular is one thing and prob. true, and prob. a major reason why Rothbard couldn't get a "decent" academic post (is UNLV not decent enough?). However, neither could Mises get a decent academic post... yet, I think we could all agree that Mises is a bright guy, even if we don't all think he was a genius (he was, no doubt, brighter than Rothbard, I think).
ReplyDeleteIt's true that Tucker's advertisement is a bit "out there", but I think that Keynes' book does especially appeal to those who do believe in government's ability to stimulate aggregate demand and what not. You don't necessarily need to be a "statist" (whatever that means) to agree with Keynes, but I would argue that it certainly does help.
What exactly is a decent academic post?
ReplyDeleteIs it one of those Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Professor of Finance or Nouriel Roubini, Distinguished Professor of Global Economics at the institution of Roubini Global Economics or Gabriel Marcia Remarque Professor of History?